Androgenic plants – a tool for the development of new breeding strategies in Anemone coronaria L.

Anemone coronaria L. is a winter-flowering allogamous species marketed as a cut flower or garden plant. To produce cut flowers, the breeders aim to obtain new improved cultivars with early flowering, flowers with large and wide petals and sepals and long thick stems that do not break during storage and transport. The production of homozygous lines is widely used for breeding programs, however, in anemones the production of pure lines is not very efficient because the progeny suffers from inbreeding depression. The use of pure lines is a desired method to be able to obtain a progeny with homogeneous and replicable characteristics. At the CREA of Sanremo the protocol to obtain androgenic A. coronaria plants was developed and widely described. As anemones are recalcitrant to in vitro culture, even when many embryos have been obtained, their conversion to seedlings is not obvious and regeneration rates are low despite a high induction rate. Applying this protocol, corms deriving from anther culture were obtained from 8 cultivars (Biancheri Creazioni), 2 diploids (‘Magenta’ and ‘Rosa’) and 6 tetraploids. Part of the corms obtained in vitro were acclimatized and androgenic plants were obtained. The plants were grown and the color, the number and size of the petals, the length and the thickness of the stems were evaluated. Furthermore, mature leaves of acclimatized plants were collected and used for evaluation of ploidy degree by flow cytometric analysis. Many morphological differences are visible between androgenic plants and mother plants such as the number, shape and color of the petals, the length and thickness of the stem and these differences have also been detected among regenerants deriving from the same mother plant. Flow cytometric analysis allowed the identification of di-haploid, doubled-haploid, haploid and chimera plants.