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Pemberton, BC

I was wondering if this had ever been tried with pumpkins?

The reason I ask is I am a seed potato farmer and this technique is widely used in the production of seed potatoes. I live in the Pemberton Valley which is a Poatao Seed Control Area which in essence means no outside sources of potato's can be planted here. Therefore we have our own lab which we use to propogate our own tissue culture seed which then gets grown out a few generations and sold.

I was in the lab yesterday doing some cuttings and thinking of pumpkins rather than potatoes (which is often the case,) and I was thinking that if I can do this with spuds why not pumpkins? I am by no means an expert in this field I just do what I was taught to do, but that said if I was given a recipe for medium for a specific plant I could reproduce them by the thousands.

Imagine from one meristem cutting from a 1068 Wallace I could have a plant for everyone on BP.com, or could I? I know on some variety of plants it doesn't work so well and on others it doesn't work at all, but could it work with pumpkins?

I am hoping Joe Ailts or Nic Welty can chime in here or any other genetics guru that may be familiar in this field. I am going to try an experiment with a cutting from one of my own pumpkin plants into some potato medium just for the hell of it, but hopefully someone has some more insight into this than I do.

Chad

PS: Here's a link on tissue culture if anyone is interested.

http://www.accessexcellence.org/LC/ST/st2bgplant.html

3/14/2007 1:10:55 AM

Ctpumpkin@optonline.net

Tissue culturing seedlings can be done & yes, this would yield multiple plants. Adam Wheeler is a plant propagator by trade. Maybe he'll chime in.

3/14/2007 7:48:56 AM

Phoenix, AZ

Excellent idea however, there is a problem: no one has a database of tissue cultures to compare samples to.

As unaware as we are of correct foliar analysis, I see pumpkin tissue sampling to be even more difficult to get feedback on.

Maybe you can start generating this database yourself like I am with foliar analysis. I would be interested and in fact have a pumpkin I can sacrifice right now on the plant.

3/14/2007 11:34:40 AM

Phoenix, AZ

I just reread you guys. Are you talking foliar sampling or fruit sampling?

3/14/2007 11:37:57 AM

Minnesota(dw447@fastmail.fm)

Chad,
When doing your tissue culture, be sure to be a sterile as possible. You want to prevent any, and all, possible damaging microbes from making contact with the growing medium. Even breathing on it can be a problem.

3/14/2007 12:44:36 PM

Pemberton, BC

Ben, check out this page. It explains it better than I can.

http://www.accessexcellence.org/LC/ST/st2bgplant.html

The way we do it with our potatoes is we watch the plants grow in the field and put flags beside plants we feel have good vigor, proper size, no disease etc.. At the end of the season we harvest those plants by hand and count the number of tubers (potatoes) under each plant, check for coloring, uniformity... and pick out one spud from from all of them that we believe has the most desirable characteristics. A sort of agricultural beauty pageant.

That one tuber is then sent off to a lab for disease testing and sent back to us in a test tube in the form of a plantlet. That plantlet is then propogated using the tissue culture methods described in the above website.

Once that single plantlet has been multiplied into several hundred plants we then plant them in a green house in pots so they can grow their own tubers. The following year those tubers are cut into pieces and planted in the field to grow more tubers. Those tubers are planted again the following spring and so on. This goes on for 1 more generation and we finally have enough potatoes to sell.

We now have several hundred tons of potatoes all genetically the same and all originating from one spud.

Now if I haven't bored anybody to death with this, it can also be done by taking a cutting from a mature plant. it would be planted into a jar, grown out and multiplied again and again.

So from one small cutting from a pumpkin plant I could theoretically make mulitiple plants all with the same genatic make-up as the original.

Whew.

3/14/2007 12:58:36 PM

Pemberton, BC

One more thing. Steve says this can be done, so I guess all I need to know is what type of medium should be used. The medium we use for spuds has specific ingredients for potatoes that I'm not sure will work for pumpkins.

3/14/2007 1:05:38 PM

Menomonie, WI (mail@gr8pumpkin.net)

I think Brigitte did something like this last year.

3/14/2007 1:10:57 PM

Ctpumpkin@optonline.net

Adam Wheeler has occasional access to the tissue culture lab at UConn. Here is the scenario to which I aspire:

I have some antique seeds that we'd like to dissect & try to coax into growing in a dish. Whatever grows can be sliced & grown on in the dish. In theory, as many new plants as desired can be cultured depending on the amount of time the lab is available.

So my comments pertain to germinating one seed & ending up with multiple plants from that seed.

The genetic code for an AG is not a requirement nor will it be determined by using this process.

3/14/2007 3:17:31 PM

I love tissue culture!!! Yeah like Shannon said, I did this last spring. Check out my 2006 diary, early spring entries. I was using my university's lab and the school year ended before I got anything too extensive. Just had a bunch of callus tissue but never got to transfer to new media to try to get shoots. I've also thought about taking embryos out of old seed coats and trying to germinate them on media. That's still all just ideas in my head though.

3/14/2007 3:24:22 PM

Also... the thing I did last spring was germinate the seeds right in the media. Pumpkins get all that hairy pubescence on their leaves which makes them hard to sterilize when putting them into culture. It's easier to start with a sterile seed and grow from there.

3/14/2007 3:27:22 PM

Pemberton, BC

Tremor,

Thats exactly what we do with potatoes and what I would like to try and do with pumpkins.

I obviously won't start with a high profile seed, but I am starting a few of my own to see if I can make it work. If nothing else it should make for some interesting diary entries.

3/14/2007 3:28:34 PM

I can probably get access to a lab until May. Then this fall from September to December. After that I'm done with college and who knows where I'll be! Home set-ups are not out of the question, but contamination is a MAJOR issue with them. Also Nick H (njh) used to do some home tissue culture. Getting the proper equipment is a lot better but also wayyyyy expensive.

3/14/2007 3:30:37 PM

Here are the links to what I did last spring.

http://www.bigpumpkins.com/Diary/DiaryViewOne.asp?eid=45608
http://www.bigpumpkins.com/Diary/DiaryViewOne.asp?eid=45608
http://www.bigpumpkins.com/Diary/DiaryViewOne.asp?eid=45644

3/14/2007 3:35:23 PM

Pemberton, BC

Very cool Brigette,

The Pemberton Seed Grower's Association of which I belong too has our own lab with an autoclave, a flow bench and so on, and we run it year round for potaoes so I think I'm going to give this a try. I may drop you an e-mail with a few questions once I get this started . I am by no means an expert in this field just a spud farmer who happens to have access to a lab and who loves pumpkins.

Chad

3/14/2007 3:46:58 PM

Cool beans. At my internship in PA last spring through fall, I actually was responsible for teaching tissue culture methods to some the students who were on a monthly rotation through the research department that I was in. Feel free to ask questions.

3/14/2007 4:05:37 PM

Pocatello (cliffwarren@yahoo.com)

Just as an aside here, but isn't this exactly what we growers have come to call "cloning"? (True, it's not really cloning, but propagating.) We've tended to call it, perhaps erroneously, "cloning".

Anyway, tubers have a very reliable way of propagating themselves from existing tissue. Pumpkins... I think it can be done, but the process is perhaps "less reliable"? If we had a better process, then, I think it might go somewhere. We have mused, in the past, the idea of taking a bunch of cuttings from a plant that had just grown the world record, keeping them alive over the winter and growing out the same plant(s) again the next year.

I would suspect that the owner of such cuttings could also make $$$$ on the venture.

3/14/2007 6:49:15 PM

Minnesota(dw447@fastmail.fm)

Good points Cliff. One advantage of tissue culture is that it would use less space, and you could get a greater number of plants, as you only need a small piece of plant for each propagation. I think cloning and propagation are interchangeable terms in plants(except maybe where grafting occurs......propagation is a better term for this, I think).

3/14/2007 6:57:34 PM

Cloning and Propagation are NOT interchangeable terms.

Clone = an organism that is genetically identical to another organism. In plants, clones come from any method of asexual reproduction, like taking cuttings or dividing plants in tissue culture. The new plants grown grew directly from the parent's tissue and are genetically identical to the parent. There are exceptions - you can use chemicals to alter the genetics and mutations can occur to change the genetics, but as a rule they are all clones of each other.

Propagation - is making more of something. In plants, this can be via seeds, cuttings, tissue culture, any form of grafting, etc. Propagation includes sexual and asexual methods of reproduction.

3/14/2007 7:06:10 PM

I didn't mean to sound like I was scolding... just clarifying things.
To put it simply, clones arise from some types of propagation. But, not all types of propagation create clones.

3/14/2007 7:08:12 PM

Minnesota(dw447@fastmail.fm)

Thanks Brigitte. I was just going to correct myself.
Cloning would fall into the vegetative, or asexual, reproduction. As opposed to nonvegetavive or sexual reproduction, which refers to reproduction from seeds or spores. I hope this is correct now LOL.

3/14/2007 7:13:56 PM

Yep, you got it now!

3/14/2007 7:22:02 PM

Bethlehem CT

Has anyone ever grown a decent sized pumpkin off of a cutting? If the answer to that is no, then I would speculate that a pumpkin propagated by tissue culture would not perform any better. Plants propagated vegetatively will lack the mysterious trait of seedling vigor.

3/15/2007 10:46:48 PM

Minnesota(dw447@fastmail.fm)

Big Moon,
I think the main objective of growing a cutting, or tissue culture, from an A.G., is to make crosses with clones from a superior producing plant, or highly sought after genetics. For example, the 1068 Wallace is out of reach for most growers, but clones could increase the number of growers who could grow a plant with the genetics of the 1068. They could make some nice crosses from their clone.
I don't know if cloned plants would be able to compete with those grown from seeds. I don't think there has been enough of these grown to draw a conclusion.

3/16/2007 12:01:44 AM

Bethlehem CT

Thanks Doug that makes more sense to me.

3/16/2007 8:07:14 AM

Ctpumpkin@optonline.net

I would agree the goal isn't to grow a monster from cultured cuttings. My goal is to preserve some old genetics that will soon be lost to time if they haven't already.

3/16/2007 9:32:07 AM

Waitakere New Zealand

from what i know of tissue culture i think there is no reason they would behave any differently to seedlings as long as they were properly weaned off and established on there roots. Having said that if the plant that grew the 1502 was cultured and ron walace grew 4 plants it is not a given that he would have 4 1502 pumpkins but i bet he would have at least one somewhere near it

3/17/2007 3:56:21 AM

Deer Park, WI

Fascinating topic, Chad. I too, like Brig, attempted to propogate AG's via tissue culture. And I too, like Brig, ended up with a mass of callous tissue that eventually became rotten due to aerial contamination. No question that AG's can be propogated via this method, the trick is inducing a biochemical shift to produce vegetative growth that can be harvested and planted. Having been out of college and consequently, the lab for 7 years now, I sadly do not have access to the tools I once had. However it seems there are folks here that do have the access. There seems to be enough brain power between the very posters on this topic to perhaps develop a protocol that could be used to our advantage. Logic tells me that what is working for other species could certainly work for AG's. Its worth a shot...

3/17/2007 7:36:31 PM

Nashville, TN

Currently, I have gotten Dr Myles from TSU bio department, to help me with obtaining preliminary data for future GP cell culture propagation.

In laymen's terms: I've given him enough seeds from the 150 Peck as well as the same amount of seeds from various commercial Hubbards. His Senior Botany class will be using tissue from these and trying to grow each of them on three different types of standard medias.

During the summer, I'll go into his research lab and do the same experiment at least three times. This will either confirm his class's results, or show that they had experimental error.

So by the end of summer we should have two questions answered: IF GP tissue will grow readily in cell culture - and- what type of basic media it grows best on.

3/19/2007 7:02:24 AM

sweet... that's exactly what I'd like to do! Too bad I don't have that botany class!

3/19/2007 8:50:10 AM

Woodinville, WA, PNW zn 7b

Has anyone tried saving a cutting of a vine overwinter in a greenhouse? Even with cuttings you could make 100 new plants from one proven plant.

Say you've just grown a record breaking fruit, and the vine is still alive. Since vines root at the leaf junction, it would be easy to take cuttings of the vine and grow them overwinter in a greenhouse in pots. Just keep them alive, keep pinching them back.

Then plant them out again in spring, the very exact genetic material that produced your big pumpkin the year before.

The record breaker could sell clones (cuttings)of the coveted giant year after year.

11/13/2007 1:09:51 AM