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How did this happen?

Harris48

Harris48

I grew 40 plants from the seeds of 3 Thai chili peppers. One of these plants grew abnormally larger and produced much bigger peppers than its siblings. I thought all the seeds from any given pepper would be genetically identical. Any ideas how this happened (mutation)?
The dried out ones are normal size for comparison (sorry I didn't have any fresh ones left).

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Peppers are generally open pollinated unless you isolate. The way this works is you grow a pure pepper from seed. Once it flowers, bugs and wind pollinate it. If that pepper has another suitable variety within (I think) like an acre it can become cross pollinated. The pepper that results from that flower will NOT exhibit any genetic differences based on the cross. However, once you grow the seeds, they carry the cross genes.

This is how pepper crosses and new types happens. A breeder takes pollen from pepper a and pollinates pepper b. He grows the seeds from pepper b and isolates the flowers. Then he grows those seeds and repeats for up to 6 or 8 seasons.

Hope this helps!

Matt
 
It's all in the genetics. If you grew all the plants from a single chili (seeds) there could still be differences in plant and pod size. Some growers use that tactic when chosing their seeds for the next grow..........."selectively" finding a unique or stable plant/pod

Greg
 
so here is the $24,000 question is this a cross or is this a mutation

not enough front info if you had a serrano growing near the thai i would blame the serrano

did the giant plant seem to be fuzzier than the "normal" size plants you grew?

was the mama plant grown by you or someone else?
 
Bryan,

I got the original 3 Thai peppers (which I seeded and started the 40 or so plants from) from a friend who bought it from a Home Depot. He did have other pepper plants growing but I'm not sure what types.

Didn't really notice any fuzziness on the larger plant but didn't look at it too closely.

I thought that all the seeds from any one pepper pod would produce the same type of plant (all crossed or all original) but different pepper pods on the same plant could produce different plant types depending on what pollinated it.
So is it possible that every seed in a pepper pod could grow a genetically different plant (some crossed some not)?

Thanks for any information.
 
in theory every seed in a pod could be completely different. Every seed is the result of the union of 1 pollen grain and 1 ovule. 1 fertilization event.

depending on the genetic makeup of the parents, every seed could be different. it would also be theoretically possible to have different pollen parents contribute pollen to the same pod.

So you could have a bhut father, a hab father, etc cross with one mother. probably not very likely, but in theory possible.

only if you have parents that are highly homozygous will all of the seeds in a pod be the same (or similar, actually)
 
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