Cristal
usually present one long-styled flower and two shortstyled
flowers. With respect to androgenesis, shortstyled
flowers have been traditionally considered
undesirable also for anther culture. Although it was
demonstrated that the androecium of these flowers is
fertile, and that the lack of fertility is mostly due to a
dysfunctional stigma (Rylski et al. 1984), some
eggplant breeders and researchers prefer not to use
anthers of these flowers. In practice, this implies a
reduction of the amount of available flower buds for
anther culture, which in turn reduces the efficiency of
this process in terms of microspore-derived embryos
obtained per donor plant. However, no scientific
proofs have been provided to date to confirm or
discard this hypothesis. This is the second goal of this
work.