Not a day passes, it seems, without news of yet another important gene being identified and mapped. Not long after geneticists uncovered the trigger for flowering, we now have news that researchers at Cornell are close to tracking down the genes that regulate a plant’s ability to self-pollinate. Good news for breeders everywhere.
I wonder if this will be one of those discoveries that proves to not be very useful in practice.
If you enable self-pollination in a out breeding plant, wouldn’t you just introduce a lot of problems with inbreeding depression?
On the other hand if you disable self-pollination in a strongly inbreeding plant, you would likely have problems because the structure of the flowers may not lend themselves to insect or wind pollination.
In any case, I would think the situation would be a lot more complicated than just controlling self-pollination.