How familiar are you with genetics? For a simplified example, lets imagine an adenium's genetic code as two jars of marbles, one for the mother and one for the father. However, when we consider that plants can self pollinate, we really only need to picture one jar that we pull two marbles from, one for mom and one for dad. Pulling two marbles out of our jar is the equivalent of making a seed, because reproductive cells only carry half of the genetic material necessary to create a whole organism. With me so far? Good.

Okay, so we start with a jar of full of pink marbles, which for the sake of this game is bottomless. The marbles all have slightly different shades of pink, and if we pull two out and average the shades, that represents the shade of the new baby. We can make hundreds of thousands of new plants, but they'll all be pink. But what if we cheated? Say we found one that seems to have a little darker pink than the rest! Now lets picture what the genwtic jar of thhat plant might look like. Still all pink marbles, but on average the marbles in that jar are ever so slightly darker than the first jar we started with. If we start drawing marbles from this jar, and keep selecting offspring that are darker eventually we wont have any more pink marbles left in the jar, only red. This is called breeding, and by selecting traits you like over and over you purify a lineage.

Now, that's all fine and dandy, but genetics is way more complicated than that. Lets consider the scenario of two jars again. This time we have one jar of pinks and one jar of red marbles. We select one of each to make a new baby. What color do we end up with? Dark pink? No! It's going to be the light pink we started with. As it turns out, certain traits are dominant, and other are recessive. In the case of Adeniums, regular pink will always overshadow a red, because by breeding we have actually been selecting for recessive traits. Mixing any cultivated adenium with a standard pink would most likely result in near 100% pink offspring. This would be considered contaminating the plant's gene pool or 'marble jar'.

Offspring from established lineages, bred by adenium experts will often give similar traits to the parent plants. Seeds from random people who have no experience breeding/crossing will likely end up pink.

Does that help?

I agree, i have bought a lot of seeds online from Mr Ko, and other breaders, but not flowered yet, i hope that I dont end up with over a hundreed shades of pink lol,. ;)

I have seen very few threads of results fron seedling grown plants... Waiting for folks to share their results;)

Great explanation, Dane. I have a ton of KO seedlings that are beginning their first bloom right now. However the time between spotting the bud and the actual bloom is taking a very long time. Will post photos as the blooms mature.

Tracy

Hopefully Rick will post soon. I know he has been talking to breeders about improving the seeds closer to parents. I know he said KO is working on this but not sure who else. So we will see what Rick has to say.

Rick I have a seedling that I found some black buds on yesterday! So exciting.

Thank you for the replies! I learned a lot.

Oh so excited, cant wait to see your posts guys, mine are 6 to 8 mo seedlings, long way to go lol, but i think they will turn good, for example, the blue boy leaves are long and curly showing its a crispum hybrid, so i think they will be quite close to their parents..... I read this a lot on the forum,,, australian breeders are getting good results...... Is there a link where we can see them?

Great explanation, Dain. I have 112 Ko seedlings started in the fall. Experience tells me several will bloom by September or October, probably an advantage of living in the San Fernando Valley part of Los Angeles (9b-10a). They are from ten different Ko varieties. While I don't expect any of them to look like the parent plants, I am hoping they will not all be pink. Several of them are from white or yellow parents. If pink is dominant, wouldn't the yellow and white plants, especially the white, be lacking the pink Genes?

While i used the term dominant, it might not be the best one. Changes in phenotype (the way an organism looks) can arise from many different changes in the genetic code which can be from breeding, mutations, or even getting the wrong or multiple number of chromosomes in a plant. Additionally, changes can occur in the way genes are expressed, hence why color changes if the temperatures do. Genetic information is incredibly complex, and there is vast amounts of it in an organism's gene pool. For example, lets assume that there are two genes that lead to pink flowers, Gene A and Gene B. While different, the plant needs both A and B in order to produce pigment, without one the flowers will be white. Now say you have two white adeniums, with flowers that look exactly the same, but one has a defective A, and the other a defective B. If you cross them, you can get the replacement for the defective gene from the other parent, and still end up making pink flowers.

Dain, I was about to make a comment about dominant alleles and the complexity of how genes are expressed. ;-) I am glad that you posted this elaboration yourself. :-)

Dain, I understand the genetics and your comments are quite explanatory. Of my seedlings, about thirty are from three different white parent plants. Presumably, none of the parent plants have both genes, hence the white flowers. Does this mean that all of the seedlings from the white plants will be white or that some could be pink, having inherited Gene A from, say, the seed producing plant and Gene B from the pollinator? I know that colors can be dominant or recessive, so, what about the seedlings from the yellow parent plants?

Good explanation.

To emphasize how much luck is involved in a single generation cross, there are a few other factors involved:

Flower color usually probably determined by more than one gene. In other words, it's not a pair of jars that determines color, it could be 3-20 pairs of jars that determine color, and enough of the significant ones have to match up to give you the color you want.

Then, it has to stay that way. Since certain colors are caused by “defective” proteins, if it sets of the plant's “DNA checkers”, the plant will attempt to correct the problem. This isn't as much a problem with flowers, but it's part of why a varigated plant will sometimes revert.

You're also fighting against thousands of years of natural selection removing mutant genes that produce colors other than pink because they were not as successful in the wild.

That being said, it's far from impossible to get a color you want. As Dane mentioned, selective breeding produces plants with fewer “pink genes”. The hardest part is getting a mutant genetic trait, and that has been done for us.

Also, one of the most popular breeding techniques is backcrossing. If you have two exeptional parents, and they have normal offspring, you can cross the offspring with a parent because it still carries the recessive traits of the parent, and the offspring from them are much more likely to have the traits you want. Periodic backcrossing can be used to create a fairly stable line of plants with the traits of the first generation parenr