Family Background Plant, Breeding History Plan Wisconsin

¶ … Family Background Plant, Breeding History Plan

Wisconsin fast plants were developed in the mid-1980's by professor Paul Williams as a way of enabling individuals to study the life cycle of plants in a relatively short period of time. Wisconsin fast plants are of the brassica rapa species, and are ideal for short-term studies because they develop celeritously over a life cycle which is completed within a year's time. They typically bloom in the winter. Although there are many different varieties of brassica rapa (which includes strains such as brassica rapa ssp. campestris L., brassica rapa ssp. sarson and others) (Itis), they are all part of the family known as cruciferae. These plants look like many types of vegetables including mustards, turnips and cabbage. Virtually all of the plants in this family have four petals that cross one another similar to a crucifix, which is where the name of this family comes from.

The breeding history of Wisconsin fast plants is fairly elaborate, and is the brainchild of Williams. Initially, Williams' goal was to develop disease resistance for plants in the cruciferae family, which is why he began breeding brassica rapa with other plants within this same family. In determining which plants would be best to breed with the brassica rapa that eventually became Wisconsin fast plants, Williams was looking for those with a relatively diminutive size, rapid flowering process, high productivity in terms of planting density and relatively easy growth in an indoors, laboratory environment facilitating copious quantities of fluorescent light.

After multiple decades of breeding this plant, Williams was able to expedite a life cycle for this type of plant from six months to one that completed itself in approximately five weeks. His breeding process largely consisted of planting, growing, and selecting certain plants that had the characteristics he desired. This artificial process enabled the researcher to take the most desirable components out of certain plants and combine them until he had achieved his desired effect. Williams and his research partner Curtis Hill (1986) found out that "rapid cycling brassicas can produce up to ten generations of seed per year and serve as models for research in genetics, host-parasite relations, molecular biology, cell biology, plant biochemistry, population biology and plant breeding" (1385). Essentially then, the breeding process involved combining the genes of varieties of plants that flowered earlier than others. Specifically, the researchers grew the plants in a soil that was actually a mixture of vermiculite and peat moss, while watering the plants with a nutrition solution that was balanced. The temperature at which the breeding was conducted was 24 degrees Celsius (Williams and Hill 1386).