plants are fucking weird (as usual)
So, reading my genetics textbook and like this mother fucking dude, George Karpechenko wanted to combine a hybrid plant for cabbages and radishes because back then people only ate the leaves these wild cabbages [ Brassica oleracea , not your grocery store one's kiddos, think more kale-looking ] and the roots of radish plants [bulb-y part]. So this dude wanted to make a plant that has leaves of cabbage but radish roots so that the whole crop wouldn't go to waste.Â
Cool Cool Cool Cool Cool Cool. A 2-for-1 crop, I can get on board with that idea. Both cabbage and radishes have 18 chromosomes in their diploid cells meaning during meiosis they produce 9 chromosomes in their haploid gametes. This number’s important to making a successful hybrid (like Ligers and mules/hinny but closer in the number of chromosomes). But these 9 chromosomes are all different chromosomes from different genomes and so they’re sterile like every other hybrid in the first try since these hybrid babies don’t have homologous pairs to evenly split off, one egg/pollen (bc plants make both) cell could have 6 chromosomes and one could have 12, a no no because that means vital chromosomes are missing in each gamete so the baby plant won’t reach maturity. Unlike animals that need rituals and behave differently to mate/develop, plants don’t have behaviors so there’s like nothing stopping geneticists from making more generations of hybrids and generations later his plants make 2 copies of their chromosomes from nondisjunction at mitosis (or meiosis, I could be wrong), a homologous pair set!!! Which means finally his babies are no longer just hybrids but allopolyploids (genomic set of DNA from 2 or more species) aka fertile have viable seeds!!! These hybrid plants ended up with cabbage roots but radish leaves and if that ain't a fucking moodÂ
