View Single Post
Old October 3, 2012   #4
carolyn137
Moderator Emeritus
 
carolyn137's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Upstate NY, zone 4b/5a
Posts: 21,169
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by harveyc View Post
I've got a hybrid tomato that is producing different fruit than the other plans I've got of the same plant. It might be a branch mutation. I'm going to take some cuttings and over-winter them in my greenhouse to grow it next year.

A friend once told me that a plant would eventually mutate and no longer come true through rooted cuttings. Is that true?

Also, will an indeterminate tomato continue to produce indefinitely if propagated through rooted cuttings?

Thanks!
As someone above explained, rooting cuttings is cloning so what you should get are identical plants.

But if you have a branch mutation, that's something entirely different. Those are called somatic mutations and arise from a DNA mutation in a cell as opposed to DNA mutations in the seed.

What variety are you growing and what are the normal fruits like for this variety and how are the fruits of one branch different?

There can also be a single fruit on a plant that's the result of a somatic mutation. A good example of that is Yellow Riesentraube which arose from a single fruit on a plant with normal red fruits.

All you need to do is to save seeds from the fruits on that one branch, I can't see the need to take a cutting and clone it. Those saved seeds, now the F2 seeds, need to be grown out again to see what kinds of plants and fruits you get. If it were an OP ( open pollinated) variety, you wouldn't have to do that but you say this somatic mutation is on an F1 hybrid so you might expect to see some genetic segregation and then make selections, etc.

If you take a single cutting, and that's all you can do with one branch, all you get is another plant and I bet you'd like to perpetuate that somatic mutation, which IMO is best done via seeds from those fruits.
__________________
Carolyn
carolyn137 is offline   Reply With Quote