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Dear All,

Everyone might be aware that I am working on CMS diversification in Tobacco, which primarily involves, developing hybrids from wild species. It was extremely encouraging, while looking at the hybrid seed/seedlings that were made with cultivated and 5 different wild species. Today we have ~3000 hybrids, more than 95% of which shows array of interesting variation at seedling level.

Often I hear a chat around in the center, what if we fail to deliver flavor? Well,

Due to conservative breeding methods used in the development of tobacco cultivars resulted in only a small portion of the germplasm pool being utilized as a parental material for new crosses. Ex. ILTD team selected 50 flue cured cultivars, released a very good varieties and hybrids out of it and this resulted in loosing >75% of allelic diversity in recent Past. Now that flue-cured out dated cultivars would no longer to consider as adequate breeding material. It looks like introduction of atleast 700 accession from NC would harbor favorable alleles for further desired genetics- based modification of our trait of interest majorly a FLAVOR. It would even generate a core collection of tobacco germplasm.

I knew people would come back to comment, "you might loose focus on CMS", but my model prioritise CMS, while still "explores additional value" to the most precise germplasm, with the little additional effort of course.