interact negatively with prescription drugs, preventing
many elderly consumers from enjoying grapefruit. We
have found that several of our pummelo breeding parents
and triploid progeny have little or no furanocoumarins
(Chen et al., submitted).
Horticultural characteristics of triploid trees are also
important, and these are also naturally affected by parentage.
We are observing significant differences in important
traits such as the level of thorniness and the length of
juvenility. For example, a small population of ‘Clementine’
derived triploids from unreduced gametes are slower to
bear fruit and much more thorny than triploid hybrids from
a cross of ‘Sugar Belle’ (‘Clementine’ 9 ‘Minneola’) with
the ‘Nova’ mandarin ? ‘Succari’ sweet orange somatic
hybrid (Fig. 3). Thus, it is advantageous to conduct a broad
range of interploid crosses using elite parents to identify
the best parental combinations to achieve specific breeding
objectives.