Development of near isogenic lines with various seed sizes and study on seed size-related characteristics in watermelon.

摘要

We inspected seed sizes of 353 genetic accessions of watermelon to diversify functional utility related to seed size and classified them into six representative groups based on their seed sizes. Each group was named as giant seed (GS), big seed (BS), medium size (NS), small size (SS), micro seed (MS) and tomato seed (TS) from the biggest. As the seed size was getting smaller, decreased seed length and seed width, increased seed number per fruit, and decreased seed weight per fruit were observed, but seed shape did not change significantly. In order to study the effect of seed size on fruit weight and seed germination, we developed three near isogenic lines (NILs) with three different seed sizes, SS, MS and TS, from crossing between two accessions 'NT' and 'TDR', and one NIL with seed size of TS from crossing between two accessions 'S55' and 'TDR'. In the study on the fruit weight of NILs with various seed sizes, NS, SS, MS, and TS NILs produced an average of 6.4, 6.3, 5.9, and 4.2 kg fruits, respectively. The bigger seed types showed the better germination rate. NS type showed the highest germination percentage, while TS showed very low germination percentage. Fermentation treatment for 48 hrs increased the germination percentage on TS type seed, but still remained at a low level. In NS, SS, and MS material, the ratio of embryo/whole seed weight was over 50%, meanwhile that of TS was only 44.4% of which low embryo percentage would be one of the reason of low germination percentage. From this study, we concluded that watermelon has very wide genetic diversity on seed size which is somehow related to fruit sizes and germination rate.