Hello everybody (specially JAXONDEL)! My name is Mariano R. Saviello, I am 25 years old and I have recently got my degree in Biotechnology in the National University of Quilmes (Buenos Aires, Argentina). I am also working in a Laboratory of Molecular Microbiology in the same University doing a research in Microbiology that will be part of my thesis, when I get my master in Biotechnology in a few months. Anyway, I am plannig to start to work in another laboratory; maybe in something related with Vegetal Biotechnology, so I am really excited about this. Maybe you are not interested in this things I have started to write, but I thought it would be good if you know something about me because it is my first message here, so you know who is writting to you. Since I was a little child I love all kind of plants, but roses are my favourite. It is true that they need many special cares, some attention and a lot of love; but this support is always proportional with the happyness they give us in their flowering time! All the time and effort we invest is well worth!. So, I have started to grow them since then. My grandfather Nilo Sánchez was also a rose grower and used to have a huge collection of roses in Necochea, a seaside town almost 500 kilometres from Buenos Aires, where we have a house in which we spend every summer harvesting cherries, plums, apricots and pears. Activity shared by many members of my family. At the moment the-in that time- huge rose collection is not what it was; but we could keep some really interesting varieties, including some old relics, really difficult to find nowadays here in Argentina ´s nurseries, although it is a pity we could not invest much time in the house because it is really far away from where I am living now (Buenos Aires). It is my hobbie and a really healthy way to spend my free time, and switch my mind off the daily routine. Some years ago or a bit more, maybe-I read about the ´Help Me Find´ website, and posted some pictures too, but could not dedicate too much time because I was studying hard to get my degree; so I used the site just to learn more things about this plant and identify some of our rose bushes. Nowadays, with more free time, I am trying to recover my grandfather ´s rose collection, and have been buying many rose bushes to fill the empty spaces of the garden (I plant each variety in the place it used to be when my grandfa was young, according to what he have told me). Everything has changed a lot and we are having now a really colourful space each spring, but we still have to recover some cultivars such as ´Charles Mallerin´, ´Yellow Talismán´, ´Tzigane´, ´Rina Herholdt´, ´Frau Kart Druschky´, ´Salmon Ange´, ´Ballet´, ´Eden Rose´, ´Crimson Glory´, ´Forty-Niner´, ´Mojave, ´President Hoover´, ´Caledonia´, ´Rumba´, ´Kordes Perfecta Superior´ and, of course CHANTRÉ ROSE. The aim of this e-mail, after reading in the ´Garden Web Forum´ that JAXONDEL said once (20, April 2009): "one can't even find a photo of it", in reference to the ´Chantré´ rose, that-in your own words- "appears to be available NOWHERE on the planet", is sending the link of the ´Chantré´ rose page in Help Me Find to all of the rose lovers who share this space, where I have recently uploaded three pictures of this magnific cultivar, property of a friend of mine. Hope one day I could grow this beauty, in order to keep walking with the rose conservation project I have started with my grandfather many years ago to re-introduce forgotten-and amost extinguised- "old" modern roses. Of course I am at your entire disposal, hoping you all enjoy these pictures. Yours sincerely, Mariano Saviello (mariano_saviello83@yahoo.com.ar) PS.: Here is the link: http://www.helpmefind.com/plant/pl.php?n=11548. If someone could contact JAXONDEL privately, please send him this message (I am new on it and do not know how to get through to him...is there any "private message" option???). Once more, my warmest regards from Buenos Aires!

OP=open pollinated Tomatoes are self fertile so if some of the pollen falls onto the stigma and ovary in the flower then it will make seeds that will grow into a plant that is identical to the original plant. The original plant is both the mother and the father of the new baby plant and it has the same genes. This is an open pollinated tomato. Heirloom tomatoes are open pollinated. There are also newer kinds of tomatoes that are open pollinated. Tomatoes can also cross with other tomatoes. Maybe the pollen from a cherry tomato gets onto the stigma from a large tomato. The seeds from that plant would have a different mother and father and may look like either parent or neither parent. The genes are a mixture of both parent plants. This is a hybrid. Seed companies purposefully cross certain tomatoes in order to get the best traits of both parents. Tomatoes like Better Boy, Solar Set, etc... are hybrids. The genes of a hybrid are not identical to the parent plants and are unstable if crossed with themselves or other plants. If you save a seed from an open pollinated variety then you know what kind of plant you will get. The seed of a Brandywine tomato makes a Brandywine plant. You don't have to buy new Brandywine seeds every year. If you save a seed from a hybrid tomato, you have no idea what kind of tomato you will get. It could taste good or bad. If could be red or yellow. Therefore you would have to buy new seeds of the hybrid every season. That was probably more than you wanted to know :)

Where are you, Enrique? I have Tripsacum dactyloides growing all around me. And I have a plant of the mutant T. dactyloides with all female flowers. That gives about 20 times the number of female flowers to work with. Or you could write to the USDA-ARS station at Woodword, Oklaholma, USA, and request seed. They would have the diploid and tetraploid forms, both of the origional and the mutant. 20 years ago, I was working with Z. diploperennis, T. dactyloides, and their hybrids with each other and domestic corn. Dr. Galinat told me that he had no success with crossing Z. diploperennis with T. dactloides. Rather, he had an amphiploid of corn X T. dactloides and pollinated it with Z. diploperennis. He got very good seed set with very good seed germination. He gave me 5 seeds from the cross. The resulting sedlings were vigorous, and grew well. But they did not produce rhizomes. Rather, they would keep tillering higher and higher on the stalks, until they climbed out of the ground. By re-planting them lower, we could keep them going. I never got backcross seeds. Others did. Library closing, must go. Walter

But getting back to basics, we have another case that appears similar. According to Darlington (Evolution of Genetic Systems, 1958) I am sure that we could take each example, of the many that were published many years ago, and follow the trail of more recently published research that provided useful information for determining if the original conclusions were reasonable. We would probably learn a great deal about many interesting subjects. But it would be time-consuming and from my viewpoint I am handicapped by having poor access to libraries with older research journals. I expect that time would be more efficiently used by examining the original research papers and determining whether accepted scientific practices were used and thus their conclusions warranted. I am going to continue with Frankel's research because although I do not think he was a fraud or a fool I do consider that his conclusions were unwarranted. It is clear from his published comments that he knew exactly where his experimental design failed to eliminate alternative explanations. His 1956 paper was considered by van Marrewijk as having shown an effect of the grafting so I will use it as the basis for my comments. From a quick examination of recent research published by the Chinese and Japanese groups on graft-induced genetic changes I expect that, in general, similar comments could be made in relation to many of the papers published on similar subjects. Frankel's paper gives no indication that he randomized the growing of any of his plant material and thus any systematic environmental differences present were not eliminated from affecting his observations. It is normal practice to have a randomized design to account for such potential effects. Nor did he provide any description of how he classified plants as sterile versus fertile. If there was any subjectivity involved in that classification then 'blind' methods would be needed to eliminate any researcher biases (that is the person classifying the plants would not know which plant was from the experimental group and which was from the control group). And most seriously he had no control for the effect of grafting. The description in the paper indicated that the effect of grafting was severe both on the scions and on the seeds produced from them. He needed a group that was fertile scion grafted to fertile stock to be able to compare and eliminate the effects of maternal environment on the offspring. These are known in plant species and can be short-term or long-term. If he had a control group he would then have had to analyze the differences in fertility between the two groups to show that the experimental treatment had a significant effect. His research material was open-pollinated, genetically variable and thus permitted alternative explanations involving selection, etc. There was no description of how he chose the plants to provide the scions, was one plant used for all scions? were a number of plants chosen at random used? and so on. He clearly understood that his design allowed alternative explanations as he states: "For several reasons these data do not permit extensive speculation about the nature of this cytoplasmic sterility." and he went on to mention the high heterozygosity, the lack of large numbers of offspring, the possibility of distorted segregation ratios due to high seedling mortality. In my opinion his conclusions are unwarranted and although he thought, "There is a remote possibility, for instance, that nutritional deficiency, which might have been induced by grafting, might cause a disturbance in cytoplasmic enzyme activity in such a way as to lead to an increase or decrease of sterility-determining entities of the cytoplasm." I consider that is the most likely explanation (omitting the specification of enzyme activity). With hindsight, from what is known now about cytoplasmic male sterility and mitochondria, the most likely explanation is that his fertile stock had individuals with substoichiometric mitochondrial variants present and that the stress induced by grafting caused a change in proportions. That type of explanation would also help explain why the results of replicating the experiment in Petunia could fail - that is, they would fail if the fertile stock chosen did not harbour the mitochondrial variant and they would fail if the grafting was easily successful and did not provide high levels of 'stress'. If 'Rosy Morn' has spontaneously produced cytoplasmic male sterile individuals then that would be evidence that it contains individuals with substoichiometric (one variant DNA copy per every, eg 100-200 cells) quantities of the variant mitochondria. It is intersting to note that a report (Bentolila, et al)quoted "In Petunia, a single dominant nuclear gene termed Rf confers fertility to lines carrying the only known CMS cytoplasm in this genus (16)." Reference 16 is a paper by Izhar, et al and Bentolila, et al thank Izhar for providing Petunia stocks; Izhar worked with Frankel. Apparently none of the cytoplasmic male sterile lines from grafted individuals are available from Frankel's work or the other research groups. It doesn't really matter at this point whether transposons, mitochondria, viruses, plasmagenes or some as-yet-unidentified phenomena are involved. Although for Touchstone, as the graft has already been made and a variant found this does apply, in general I cannot agree that it does not matter. For example, if one is interested in genetic variation caused by a transposon then it would be easier and more efficient to begin with a stock that has an active transposon than to graft a stabilized strain in the hopes of reactivating the transposon and producing interesting genetic variants. The question returns to "does grafting cause any changes that are different from those that can be caused by alternative methods?" and "can those alternative methods be more practical/effective/efficient than grafting?" If the cytoplasmic male sterility history (Frankel) is a general example I would conclude that the answer to those two questions, in order, is no and yes.