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[gator]

I recently discovered many Psychotria Nervosa plants growing wild out in the back yard. I have also been growing Psychotria Alba in close proximity to these plants. This is the first season I've allowed plants to fruit. I plan on trying to cross the two plants next season, when they flower, by putting one of the Alba in isolation and fertilizing w/ a Nervosa.
Could nature have already crossed the two plants? I noticed butterflies were attracted to both types of plants and stayed around them for about 30 45 days. I guess I would have to grow every seed and look for differences in the plants to find out if this is true? If anyone has any information I could use for this experiment, please, drop some knowledge my way 

[PermieGing]

Wild psychotria nervosa :0

Id love some seeds of that, if you happen to come across any. Id definatly trade

But i dont know anything about the two crossing. Sorry

[gator]

Wild psychotria nervosa :0

Id love some seeds of that, if you happen to come across any. Id definatly trade

But i dont know anything about the two crossing. Sorry

When the berries are ripe I'll put them on my share list.
I'm doing an experiment to see if it roots similarly to the other varieties, IE cutting or leaf cutting.

[TBM]

If the butterflies were attracted to both the P. alba and nervosa, then I'd say there's a good chance that they cross pollinated at least some of the seeds, are both species producing berries or just one of them? My guess is if both have berries ripening then yea, you'll have yourself some hybrids mixed in with the 'pure bred' seeds. Is there any way to identify which would be a hybrid berry/seed before planting?

[Mandrake]

I plan on trying to cross the two plants next season, when they flower, by putting one of the Alba in isolation and fertilizing w/ a Nervosa.
Could nature have already crossed the two plants? I noticed butterflies were attracted to both types of plants and stayed around them for about 30 45 days. I guess I would have to grow every seed and look for differences in the plants to find out if this is true? If anyone has any information I could use for this experiment, please, drop some knowledge my way 

I don't want to rain on your parade, but by definition, aren't Psychotria Alba and Psychotria Nervosa two different recognized species? You can cross pollinate between different individuals of the same species, or between two varieties of the same species, but as far as I know, not between different species.

Kind regards,

Mandrake

[infiniteohms]

I plan on trying to cross the two plants next season, when they flower, by putting one of the Alba in isolation and fertilizing w/ a Nervosa.
Could nature have already crossed the two plants? I noticed butterflies were attracted to both types of plants and stayed around them for about 30 45 days. I guess I would have to grow every seed and look for differences in the plants to find out if this is true? If anyone has any information I could use for this experiment, please, drop some knowledge my way 

I don't want to rain on your parade, but by definition, aren't Psychotria Alba and Psychotria Nervosa two different recognized species? You can cross pollinate between different individuals of the same species, or between two varieties of the same species, but as far as I know, not between different species.

Kind regards,

Mandrake

Interspecies hybrids are pretty common in the plant world (more so then with animals at least), judgeing by the fact that Psychotria "Nexus" is supposed to be a P. viridis x P. carthaginensis hyrid a P. alba x P. Nervosa hyrid doesn't seem out of the question at all.

[infiniteohms]

if you really want a hybrid i would isolate a few flowers on each species (like with a bag made of cheese cloth around the flowers), remove the male parts of each flower (to prevent possible self-fertilization) and then hand pollanate those flowers with pollen from the other species (and then bad the flowers again). If those flowers set seed you can be reasonably sure you have hybrid seeds, then you can plant 'em out and see what (if anything) grows.

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[New Wisdom]

I plan on trying to cross the two plants next season, when they flower, by putting one of the Alba in isolation and fertilizing w/ a Nervosa.
Could nature have already crossed the two plants? I noticed butterflies were attracted to both types of plants and stayed around them for about 30 45 days. I guess I would have to grow every seed and look for differences in the plants to find out if this is true? If anyone has any information I could use for this experiment, please, drop some knowledge my way 

I don't want to rain on your parade, but by definition, aren't Psychotria Alba and Psychotria Nervosa two different recognized species? You can cross pollinate between different individuals of the same species, or between two varieties of the same species, but as far as I know, not between different species.

Kind regards,

Mandrake

Yeah, cross species breeds happen all the time.  In the same genus there is a chance that they will be able to create a hybrid.  There are viridis/carth psychotria hybrids floating around called "Psychotria nexus"  Hell, you can even cross a lophophora with ariocarpus or aztekium (sometimes).  And those are different genus all together.

[Sunshine]

Once two species are crossed the result must be back crossed with one of the original parent species to create a stable hybrid iirc.

Personally I'd like to see a viridis crossed with an alba or carth.

[New Wisdom]

Like i said, viridis is already crossed with carth. It's called Psychotria "Nexus"

[Seed Collector]

The Biological Species Concept is what Mandrake was referring to (where 2 species can't have fertile offspring together)- however, this is most useful when studying animals, not plants.

The Morphological Species Concept is more useful when studying plants, due to both cryptic species and hybrid-swarm species (more plant taxonomists use the morphological species concept).

Multiple plant species can interbreed and can have fertile offspring, no doubt. Closely related species would likely be more successful than plants from different families (Psychotria is Genus level, so it can be done).

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[Mandrake]

The Biological Species Concept is what Mandrake was referring to (where 2 species can't have fertile offspring together)- however, this is most useful when studying animals, not plants.

Good to know. I should have focused in botany more than zoology years ago, I would be reaping more practical benefits today.

Thanks for the correction,

Mandrake

[MadPlanter]

I have no idea if this is true but I read somewhere that P. carth and P. alba are synonymous or the same species just a name change. Anyone know for sure?

[gator]

The flowers and berries of the plants look very similar. The flowers were the same color, white.

[PhytoFlight]

This paper (attached) is relevant, I believe.

The Nature of the Opportunity Ever since the pioneering common-garden experiments of Clausen et al.,  evolutionary ecologists have been attempting to understand the genetic and environmental components of phenotypic plasticity in plants in relation to environmental gradients, and the adaptive significance of plasticity. A fundamental but still unresolved question about the evolution of adaptation is the extent to which species are composed of genetically polymorphic populations of individuals, or of phenotypically plastic but genetically similar individuals across variable environments. This is of course not an either or question but a quantitative one. More recently, a new perspective on plasticity has emerged, namely that plasticity is not always adaptive, but instead often reflects non-adaptive responses to stress. Understanding adaptation and plasticity is difficult at best, and progress toward understanding the genetic basis of adaptation in particular has been hindered by inadequate methods

This seems to suggest that even within the same Psychotria species, physical attributes are variant. They evolve very quickly to adapt to new environments (same source), which would suggest a propensity for high chances at hybridization, as breeding with itself would by necessity be flexible. See page 7 for differing growing conditions. There are also apparently 1600 (!) such species.

Also Psychotria offers the potential to do crossing experiments relatively rapidly (for a woody plant) to obtain F 2 populations for genetic mapping of QTL traits. For example, seedlings of P. horizontalis from one genet can be grafted onto the crowns of other adult genets and induced to flower within 12-24 months.

Regarding genomics:

We are not aware of a comprehensive set of chromosome counts for the members of the genus, although 2n=22 has been reported for Psychotria ligustrifolia (Northrop) Millsp. P. undata Jacq. [89] and P. hoffmann-seggiana[33] and 2n=32 for Psychotria deflexa[33]. No estimates of C-value for Psychotria are available in the Kew database (www.kew.org/cval), and only 379 sequence reads are available for the entire genus in GenBank, with a maximum of 15 for any one species (P. mariniana), mostly comprising ribosomal RNA and chloroplast-related sequen- ces used in molecular systematics. This glaring need is only partly mitigated by the availability of more than 62,000 ESTs for another member of the Rubiaceae, Coffea (coffee).

Hope this helps.

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