Likelihood of getting a green from F2s?

[gflynn]

Tomato Folks,

Two years back I crossed White Current with Cherokee Green. Last year I got a purple/burgendy cherry from the cross, named it MORX and entered it at out local tomato tasting competition. It was great tasting and won first place for flavor.

This year I am growing out 18 of the F2s and I was wondering if anyone could guess the likelihood of getting a green-when-ripe out of the cross?

What do you suppose the distribution of colors might be? I would assume that I would get 1/4 green if it is as simple as requiring 2 traits for green-when-ripe similar to eye-color.

Greg

[nctomatoman]

Check out the Dwarf project - Golden Dwarf Champion was crossed with Green Giant - we saw a nice distribution of green and yellow (of various shades) in the F2 and beyond. Go to the Sneezy page and check out the F2 threads.

[gflynn]

Craig,

I will have a look, however, Green Giant's green trait is different from Cherokee Green as Keith pointed out long ago. Also, I got a muddy color in the F1 and not a yellow in the F2 as Tom Wagner said could happen occasionally.

I think mine be a different animal but I will have a look see.

Thanks,
Greg

[nctomatoman]

No problem - keep us informed as to what you get. Another point - we used Cherokee Green in another of our crosses (with a red dwarf) and have green fleshed in the future generations. I think you have a great chance of seeing green!

[Tom Wagner]

Greg and others

Some of the maddening things about tomato genetics.....including misconceptions and logic when it comes to appearances of the hybrid and the resulting F-2 progeny...providing there was no outcrossing in the F-1 fruit....is separating out the genotypes and phenotypes.

First of all...most folks would be surprised that a white and green crossed together would produce a purple/burgundy cherry from the cross, the one you named MORX!

The parents should be looked at again...and I included a link to both below:

Cherokee Green

http://www.victoryseeds.com/catalog/...okee_green.jpg

White Currant
http://www.smallwonderfarm.com/jpegs...itecurrant.jpg

I thought Greg might have posted a photo of Morx somewhere but this is the result of my first search....

I arrived at the park on a Saturday afternoon just as the field of favorites had been narrowed to two contenders, a white currant and a small brown cherry called Morx. Asked to issue a judgment, I ate both and picked the Morx. It had both the tang of a Cherokee and the sweetness of a currant.
It turned out that both contenders were grown by Greg Flynn, a software engineer who propagated something close to 750 tomato seedlings in his Damascus garden.
I grow a few tomatoes. This year I have about 25 plants, but I had never heard of Morx.
That’s because Flynn made up the name. “It is short for mutant or cross. I wasn’t exactly sure which it was,” said Flynn. Eventually, Flynn determined that the Morx is a cross between a green Cherokee tomato and a white currant.

So the White Currant was also a winner and is Morx is a "determined" hybrid of it. I notice that this reviewer calls it a brown cherry, not a "purple burgundy" but I know first-hand how hard it is to describe colors.

Now....how will the seedling segregate? Good question, but unless you have dozens and dozens of plants, your actual array of colors may be misleading. I would expect many of the seedlings to have brown fruits much like the hybrid, a very few white (with clear epidermis) a few yellows, a few muddy greens, a few greens and always....a few surprises. The difference between a yellow epidermis brown/purple/burgundy fruit and a clear epidermis brown/purple/burgundy can be subtle or dramatic, depending on the reviewer.


A thing about the Cherokee Green....it came out of the Cherokee Chocolate which in turn came out the Cherokee Purple. Notice the history Craig gives for the clones in other forum discussions (you look them up) and I thought of how a Cherokee Purple might have been crossed to a say...Aunt Rubys Green... the hybrid could have been brown or chocolate. A crossover of the red and green genes could have kept it true breeding until the crossover disentangled itself and produced a green fleshed Cherokee Chocolate...this sort of thing has happened to me too. You thing something is true to type and all of of sudden the unexpected occurs...BTW, I should explain the nature of crossovers some day.

Back to the F-2 Morx...most of the seedlings will have salad cherry sizes and smaller, but a few will have larger fruits, but very few the size of Cherokee Green....not one out of four like you might expect. And many of the large fruits will have reduced numbers of locules.....and yet a very few will have large fruits with many seedy locules. It may take a few generation of seed increase of selected lines to get back to the Cherokee Green type, but it may be worth it. The hardest thing to do will be keeping the sweetness and tang together in a large type fruit, keeping those together in a cherry salad size should be much easier.

Tom Wagner

[gflynn]

Tom,

Thanks for the info. MORX was supposedly created by taking an isolated White Current plant (on the other side of my home on the deck) and rubbing a Cherokee Green flower against it.

Now I could be way wrong so I would think that the way to be sure is to grow out more of the crossed seeds and see if MORX reappears. Also, it could be a cross for the White Current I had in the front yard and I just got my seeds mixed up.

I would suppose that if none of my 18 plants produce a green fruit then I may be wrong about the second parent.

Thanks again,
Greg

[Tom Wagner]

Greg,

If Cherokee Green is not the purported parent of Morx, a green grandchild would be perhaps hard to find. But, if it is......18 plants should give you at least two that will be green. Prove me wrong!

[gflynn]

Tom,

I figure 2 months will answer this question difinitively. Can't wait to see!

Greg

[TZ-OH6]

I don't understand the genetics going on here


Yellow flesh is rr, and green is rr gfgf so where is the red R allele coming from for the "black" F1?

AFAIK the only way to get a "black" fruit F1 from a green parent is to cross it with a Black (e.g. black cherry). RR gfgf x rr gfgf = Rr gfgf

[gflynn]

TZ-OH6,

I am not sure either. It is possible that it crossed with a black or purple variety since they are in my yard but on the other side of the house. Tom, however, seems to think that it is possible that green x yellow can result in a red/purple/black. In this case, however, the seed come from a pale yellow type. Would a pale yellow be gf+/gf+, r/r? In which case a cross with Black Cherry may look like +gf/+gf, r/r X R/R, gf/gf = +gf/gf, R/r

Would this be red?

Also this would give you the one in 16 green in the F2s.

Greg

[nctomatoman]

Some info -

From our Green Giant X Golden Dwarf Champion type, we've seen green flesh/clear skin, yellow flesh/clear skin, yellow flesh/yellow skin, and ivory flesh/clear skin - so green, different shades of yellow, and white.

From our Cherokee Green X Budai cross, we've seen red, yellow flesh/yellow skin, very pale yellow flesh/deep yellow skin, brown (dark flesh,yellow skin), and green (green flesh, yellow skin), as well as an indeterminate that had dark flesh and clear skin (purple).

[gflynn]

Criag,

What color is Budai?

Greg

[nctomatoman]

Budai is a small fruited red Dwarf variety. So red flesh, yellow skin crossed with green flesh, yellow skin.

[TZ-OH6]

It does get confusing if the seed parent is yellow. I think it would have to be rr, gf+ gf (unstable yellow) x RR, gfgf to get a black f1. I'm bad at head math so I would have to plot out the punnet square in a spreadsheet to see the ratio in the F2s. I do it in Excel for my crosses and I color the cells for an easy visual.


I'm not really sure about presence/absence of some genes like gf. I'm guessing that the "gf" gene is always present and if it is not gf then it is gf+, gf+ being the norm in non green/black tomatoes


I see no problem with a bee flying around the house. I've watched them fly 50-60 feet between plots and skip plants when they do it. They scent mark flowers that they have visited and often skip plants that have no available pollen. Based on grow outs, some of my bee crosses were between plants 20 feet apart with many plants in between.



Green x red/pink give all kinds of fun colors in F2. I'm doing a second F2 grow out of a red cherry x Lime Green Salad this year. Last year I got a couple of really tasty full sized red cherry plants (determinant and indeterminante). The many colored dwarfs tasted OK, but late blight got them so I'm not sure if the flavor was as good as could be...so I decided to grow out a bunch more this year.