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Old January 17, 2018   #39
bower
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Join Date: Feb 2012
Location: Newfoundland, Canada
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Originally Posted by Rajun Gardener View Post
Yes, I meant tomatoes bigger than Compari and still maintain the growth habit of a cherry plant. I guess it really doesn't matter as long as it clusters with 7-10 tomatoes and the clusters are close to each other on the plant.

How would I go about selecting for this without having to grow many plants out?
Rajun, you should get some intermediate sized tomatoes in the F2 fairly easily. If you wanted really large ones, you would have to grow many more plants. If you go to Frogsleap's site, there is a really interesting blog showing some data about the skewed distribution for size - skewed towards smaller fruit instead of a simple Mendelian ratio outcome.
If you're looking for medium size, I think you could expect to find it with half a dozen F2s.
As for the ruffles, I don't know exactly how those genetics work, but it is at least connected to the fas gene I think. I mean, I think it needs the fas (fasciated) trait to be expressed. I would love to see your results, how many ruffled in the F2, and how much that varies.
I've been pondering the genetics of "ugly" fruit, thinking of several ruffly ones that also had many shape defects. No idea how many I would have to grow out to find some PERFECTLY formed ruffled fruit.
Lastly, the cluster size - watch for interesting changes in cluster size. There were several threads or posts and some items in the news about this last year if you read through you will find them. There is epistasis at work in many tomato lines, which reduces the size of cluster. So you can get unexpectedly large clusters from a cross where this little epistatic effect is undone. This happened to me, and ended up with an F3 cluster size = 38 blooms from largest parent cluster size = 12-16 double branched. Be careful what you wish for.
Note that the epistatic effect iirc was considered desirable in breeding, to reduce cluster size and get larger and/or more uniform size of individual fruit. There may be limits in the combo of fruit size/cluster size.
All of the above comment is just, as I remember it this morning, without looking up any refs. So may stand to be corrected.
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