December 17-18, 2026

¹Agromar Marmara Tarım Ürünleri A.Ş, Karacabey, Bursa, Turkiye; ²Antalya Tarım Ürünleri A.Ş, Antalya, Turkiye; ³Doqutech Academy L.L.C., Ankara University Technopolis, Ankara, Turkiye; ⁴Retired, Department of Horticulture, Erciyes University, Melikgazi, Kayseri, Turkiye.

Abstract

Cucumber (Cucumis sativus L.), among the top 10 most cultivated products among fruits and vegetables, has a production of 87.8 million t in the world and Turkiye ranks second after China with 1.9 million t of production. It is necessary to carry out effective and rapid breeding studies in order to develop high yielding and resistant hybrid cultivars to both abiotic and biotic stress factors in cucumber cultivation. In order to achieve these goals, ovary culture for obtaining homozygous lines rapidly and cytoplasmic evaluations for deciding on whether reciprocal crosses were needed in our cucumber breeding programs. For ovary culture, 50 donor genotypes were used across nine different media including different auxin/cytokinin concentrations resulted in a total of 2582 embryos. From these embryos, 935 plants were obtained. 707 haploid lines were detected based on flow cytometry analyses and 509 were acclimatized under greenhouse conditions. After colchisine treatment 407 DH pure lines were obtained. Reciprocal crosses are made based on the idea that the cytoplasmic organelles (plastid and mitochondria) between individuals are different from each other significantly increases the labor. In cases where cytoplasmic organelles are not different, reciprocal crosses are avoided. In this study, four plastid genome regions (rbcL, psb-trnS, trnHK, trnST) of 50 donor genotypes were investigated. The PCR products obtained by using specific primers designed for this purpose were sequenced. The resulting band sizes were approximately about 900, 1500, 3000 and 1400 base pairs. The sequences of 50 genotypes were analyzed by MEGA Genetic Analysis Program. According to the alignment results of the obtained sequences, no nucleotide variation exists among the donor genotypes. Assuming no cytoplasmic variations among these 50 donor genotypes and derived hundreds of lines from these donor plants, all reciprocal crosses were excluded. This analysis can provide rapidity and savings in breeding by eliminating unnecessary reciprocal test crosses.

Keywords: breeding, Cucumis sativus L., cytoplasmic genome prediction, doubled haploid, gynogenesis, ovary culture

INTRODUCTION

MATERIALS and METHODS

RESULTS

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