Friday, June 9, 2017

What You Need To Know About Controlled Pollination

By David Jackson


Basically, control-pollination is a technique that is often used in plant improvement so as to produce offspring or progeny with genes from two known plants. Therefore, Controlled Pollination involves transferring the pollen from a plant to the receptive female organs of another plant and all other pollen are excluded. This practice is commonly practiced in horticulture, as well as in genetic experiments.

This form of pollen transfer is usually necessary when you want to maintain and establish a pedigree breeding population. The technique is also important in controlling inbreeding within a breeding population. This technique is also effective in crossbreeding and back-crossing among species. Generally, the technique is designed and managed in a special way to produce seeds that have greater genetic characteristics. The seeds produced also have a greater genetic uniformity compared to the plants that are spontaneously pollinated. Pollen contamination issues are also eliminated.

Hand pollinating allows you to control how the plants reproduce and ensure that you get the best fruits. In this hand pollinating technique, you are only required to use a brush to paint the pollen from the male species to the female, and reproduction begins. The efficiency of this method depends on the type of flower, and it can work in one flower and fail in another. Flowers have varying structures, and you should be keen when doing hand pollination to achieve the desired results.

Contrarily, the removal of male parts or emasculation can be carried out in instances where control-pollinating has been done. This essentially aids in the elimination of self-contamination. Nevertheless, there is never a need to be apprehensive about self-sterile species thus emasculation may not be necessary. Also, the technique calls for pollen transfers to be undertaken only when flowers are ready for pollinating. Because this remains challenging, the pollens ought to be collected and stored much earlier.

In all the critical pollinating procedures bagging is very imperative. The flower receiving the pollen which is the female part should not be subjected to light to prevent the stigma from getting contaminated. Contamination can interfere with the entire procedure causing failure. To protect the female flower treated bags that are transparent are used to cover the plant before actual pollination. The bags should be put in a tight manner to ensure that the procedure is successful.

When there are right conditions, pollination usually occur naturally. The temperatures should also be within the optimal level required. At the same time, bees should be active and present, and pollinators should also be flowering. Since bee populations and variability of weather are vulnerable, natural pollination may not always occur.

But when pollinating is controlled, growers are able to time application of the compatible pollen and, therefore, will not have to depend on the nature that cannot be predicted. On the other hand, trees that require crosspollination may be pollinated even when the pollinating neighbors are not flowering.

On the other hand, pollen may be applied through a wide range of methods efficiently through the controlled technique. Basically, control technique of pollinating is usually an important aspect in plant breeding, as well as in hybrid seed production. Although there are many techniques for the control method, the choice of the method used depends on the type of crop. Nevertheless, mechanical pollinating control is the widely used although it is time-consuming and labor intensive.




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