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The purity testing system of watermelon seeds developed by TSIPS
Taiwan ’ s weather is burning hot these days, how about eating a slice of watermelon? Taiwan, known as Kingdom of Fruit, has different kinds of watermelon. But how can we identify the variety purity of watermelon seeds?
TSIPS (Taiwan Seed Improvement and Propagation Station) had developed a set of 16 molecular markers for testing more than 20 domestic watermelon hybrid varieties. The technique would be a very useful tool to access seed quality.
Watermelon ( Citrullus lanatus) is one of the main vegetables with about 3.5 million hectares of cultivation area worldwide. The export gross in Taiwan is nearly 2.4 million US dollars derived from export of watermelon seeds made by Taiwanese breeders.
Most of commercial watermelon seeds are F 1 hybrids which have higher yield, more excellent disease resistance and other better cultivar performance than their parents. In traditional cultivation, seed suppliers have to plant a number of seeds, and observe them from seedling stage to fruiting period for making sure the hybrid seeds purity. The process is time and labor consuming and might be failed due to environmental reasons like bad weather.
TSIPS says, molecular marker is a more efficiency way to test seed purity of commercial hybrid seeds than conventional morphology method. It can realize the seed purity as soon as seedling stage and no need to maintain plantlets to latter stages.
Figure 1. The molecular markers show that hybrid F 1 contains both male and female parents ’ genome.
Figure 2. We can test seeds ’ purity by molecular markers on seeding stage.