Do plant breeders prefer to work with
dominant or
recessive traits?
While dominant traits are more commonly generated in families that have the
trait, the breeder will actually have less work in establishing a true breeding
line that expresses a recessive trait. Red vs. white wheat is a good example. Once a white seeded F2 is identified we know it will be true breeding because it is homozyous recessive at the
gene pairs that control this trait (fig. 7). Red F2s are more common but a breeder does not know if a red type they select will produce white offspring because they carry the
recessive allele for white. A breeder must grow out
progeny from the reds, make sure they are all red and harvest this family separately to insure they have identified a true breeding red. Both dominant and recessive traits can be established in true breeding
lines but the
selection for true breeding parents is easiest with recessive traits.
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