My two pence (cents) worth........

Most spontaneous mutations tend to be either lethal or inconsequential. You have about a 1 in 50,000 chance of hitting the gene of interest (e.g. a cold hardyness gene) and then an even slimmer chance of inducing a mutation in that gene that produces the right phenotype. I guess colchicine might act slightly differently to the most commonly used mutagens like radiation and chemicals in that it is more likely to induce a change in ploidy (i.e. chromosome number) something that commonly occurs in plants. Your best bet is always going to be either selective breeding. Of course the problem is going to be getting your parental bamboos of interest into flower at the same time (and assuming they will cross-pollinate). Most breeding programs rely on a fairly rapid turnover of offspring (30-100 years might strain the patience of the breeder a bit!). Another option (and definitely not very popular over here in Europe) is trans-species genetic modification e.g. as they have done with strawberries where they inserted a gene from an arctic fish making the fruit more frost resistant.

Colchicine is used to induce polyploidy in plants which makes it possible to produce fertile crosses between two species. Most bamboos are already polyploid, so it is questionable whether you gain anything or not.

I did at one time find a link to a page where someone was experimenting on bamboo with a homebrew recombinant DNA system, but that URL is no longer working. It is truly scary what can be done with simple everyday items.

Hi,
Asked my brother, IT-consultant at a grass-seed supplier, to ask around at the breed/development departement.
It was almost a curse when he mentioned that i told bamboo was also "just grass". Even grass is not just grass!

The long intervals of seed production in bamboo species will be the bottleneck for natural X-breeding. You're right Pete! We don't have time of live to try.

Will intensify my search for nice links on recombinant DNA in combination with bamboo.

Google you later!

Mike

Found a few articles on precocious flowering of bamboos induced by treatment with auxins/cytokinins. Looks like you can get the flowering interval down from 60 years to 3 months if you have access to tissue culture techniques. The linked article is an abstract of one.

Here is a link that might be useful: Review of in vitro flowering in bamboo.

Possibly too you could save pollen in deep freeze --start sort of a bamboo pollen bank, and share with others who have plants blooming.

It looks like the Aussies have been cross-breading clumpers.

From the bambooworld website:

We also have the following cross-bred bamboos:
Dendrocalamus latiflorus x Bambusa pervariabilis cross.
Dendrocalamus latiflorus x Bambusa textilis cross.
Bambusa pervariabilis x D latiflorus & B textilis cross.
Dendrocalamus latiflorus x Gigantochloa levis cross.

Here is a link that might be useful: bambooworld.com.au

I don't mean to hi-jack your post but I was wondering if anyone had a photo of bamboo blooms? I have bamboo growing at the back of my house and two or three of the plants have tassels at the very top tip. If it is blooms, what is the likelihood of it producing seeds? If it produces seed, how long will they keep? My wife and I are just renting this place and hope to be finding a place of our own in a year or two. I don't really want to dig any of it up and if it is blooming, according to what I have read, it will die off. Please help! I would like bamboo around my ponds in the future.

Thanks,
Scott

What kind of bamboo is it? Does it have wide leaves? If it does, then it may not be bamboo at all but perhaps Japanese Knotweed or something similar.

Pondman-
Your description does not match up with what bamboo looks like in flower. Are the leaves attached directly to the main stalk (not bamboo) or to branches (bamboo). Also, if it dies back annually in your climate, it's not bamboo. I'm guessing that it's a giant reed, like Arundo donax. Check out the thumbnails at this link and see what you think:

Arundo donax

The leaves are both attached to the main stem and to branches. It does not die back in the winter. What I said is if it is bamboo and it blooms, that's it, the plant will die. The leaves start out varigated and large. The leaves are like 16-20" long and 2-2 1/2" wide. As the stalk gets older, it arches over and the leaves get smaller and branches form. Also, if you cut the top off, it branches out. The stems are also hollow. Plants are not new to me, just bamboo.

G'day,
Scott

Pondman-
Do you have a picture you can post? I don't know of any bamboo that has leaves like that, and I don't know of any bamboo that has leaves attached both to branches and to the stalks/culms. Bamboo flower at the tips of branches, and the flowers/seeds are generally not very impressive. They also only flower very rarely...like maybe once in 20-100 years. Here is one example of bamboo flowering (appearance varies by species):

F. nitida

I'm not trying to be argumentative. It just doesn't sound to me like it's bamboo.