Molecular Breeding
Hypericum perforatum
Objective
Development of the haploid technique for St John's wort
to accelerate the achievement of new breeding goals.
Background
The project focuses on the establishment of a method for the production of haploid or double-haploid St John's wort lines. This is intended to provide the basis for the accelerated achievement of new breeding objectives in the development of new St. John's wort varieties.
St John's wort (Hypericum perforatum) is one of the most important medicinal plants cultivated in Germany. A new, ground-breaking application for St John's wort extracts was recently discovered with its effect against Alzheimer's dementia. However, this effect appears to be independent of hypericin, one of the main active ingredients of St John's wort extract, whose high content has been a breeding target in St John's wort cultivation to date. However, due to the facultative apomictic fertilisation of St. John's wort, new properties cannot be introduced conventionally via crossbreeding. St. John's wort is a self-fertiliser, but is very heterozygous due to its apomictic mode of reproduction. With the help of the haploid technique, basic material with increased genetic variability is to be created and made available for the development of new varieties. From an assortment of 30-40 genotypes, among which different ploidy levels are represented, those with tissue culture suitability and potential for androgenesis are selected.
Both anther culture and microspore culture are tested. Selected genotypes will be used for the development of an efficient crossing protocol. The developed method will be used to generate double-haploid and haploid lines from polyploid donor plants. Pharmaceutically relevant ingredients and ploidy levels will be determined and a possible correlation between ploidy level and type of propagation will be analysed. Lines of interest will be propagated for future field trials.
The project was funded by
