In pointing out that the resynthesis of oilseed rape goes back a little further than I originally thought, Toby Hodgkin offers a little more background on the whole story.
A general point is the importance of pre-breeding as part of the overall crop improvement process. It’s also worth commenting that the idea of resynthesis and hybrid transfers of useful genes in Brassicas was part of the breeding process at Scottish Plant Breeding Station, SCRI and in a number of European and American groups from the late 1960s on. There was quite a lot of interesting work on the relative merits of crossing at different ploidy levels, on the tissue culture processes to use and on the consequences of making the crosses in different directions and the results from subsequent backcrosses.
I hear that there is currently an interest in biofuel rapeseed. In this case the nasty biochemicals wouldn’t matter much while heterosis might be the real interest. Almost back to the start of the resurgence of rapeseed in the second world war in Canada – as a source of high quality (high erucic) oil for aeroplanes.
Who is capturing these memories?