Australia: Kings Park progresses in wax breeding project

Researchers at the Botanic Gardens and Parks Authority in WA (Kings Park) are making progress with a breeding project ‘Advanced biotechnology systems for propagation and breeding of Australian plants’.

In conventional breeding, there are many barriers to success and generally, the more distant the botanical relationship between the parent species, the greater the number of barriers present.

The benefit of fusion technologies is that the breeders can hybridise widely related plants at higher rates, and in addition the progeny will have some level of fertility due to their tetraploid nature. The first fused hybrid plants are growing in pots at Kings Park Botanic Garden, waiting for flowering.

Using the same techniques, the researchers have also created fertile Pearlflower hybrids for the first time. This is a big step for the team, as all the past hybrids have been sterile. This should allow them to get some significant variation in form and flowering through sibling crossing, out crossing and back crossing. And there’s more.

Helix Australia will continue to invest and work closely with the team at Kings Park Botanic Garden to help transfer the research outcomes into commercial availability for the global cut flower and plant market in the coming years.

For more information:
Helix Australia
www.helixaustralia.com.au