By law you do required to apply for permit. It should be apply thru customs for quarentein clearance. Or contact customs and they should have some idea about who you should speak to.
But people do able to "smuggle" in foreign life form via mail packages, sometimes customs will confestigate it, sometime the packages will just got thru. I do recall that there was a group of uni researchers that ordered some earthworms thru the internet, and they got it thru mail. Another famous example is that our rubber trees are actually smuggled in from brazil during the early days in the form of rubber seed, and hence we have all our rubber trees.
So, if you really want to order chili seeds from oversea, its better that you apply for permit first. As quality chili seeds usually cost as much as real gold by weight. Dont do something like me - send a mooncake box to hometown and it never arrive.
Mind tell us why you dont order from local provider? They are reputable and readily available, sometimes they can even provide technical assistance.
. We have been talking about mushroom seedings, plant cloning, and then oil palm.
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FYI, i did tried "cloning" mushroom before referring to instructions i found frm internet.
Cooked some potato water jelly as the growing medium, i lay mushroom pieces on it and seal it with aluminium foil.
Our of 6 samples, 5 turns out to be colourful fungus - some black, some brown, etc. Which indicates containmination.
It seem like the last one has been lucky, pure white silky stuff multiplying on the jelly, I suppose they are mycelium.
Too bad it has been left around for way too long and was disposed by my gf after my outstation business. :/ Never have the change to plant it on a bag of saw dust and see if i can get mushroom.
(last nite just my MSN left open in office
)
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Oh... Actually, that is not cloning lei... It is actually a form of mushroom seeding. What is being done basically is to inocculate the media jelly with the spores of the mushroom.
Mushroom cloning does exist, though the methodology is quite different. Essentially, you take the young mycelia (new sprout) from an identified high performance population, splice it up into a dozen of so pieces, and implant them onto new media (of a different chemistry which promotes growth). As the new sprout consist largely of undifferentiated cells, new fruiting bodies can easily develop from them, hence developing into new subpopulations of the high performance one.
However, that method is tedious, comparatively expensive, and requires a very high degree of expertise and care. The seeding method is much easier, although in the subpopulations there may be quite a high degree of variance in performance. Spores are essentially like the seeds of dicots and monocots, and they do have genetic recombinations of different "parents".
To tackle the problem with fungal contamination, as well as bacterial contaminations, it is absolutely important to keep your workstation sterile. Meaning, no blowing fan or open places (dust particles could carry fungal spores), use only sterilized equipments (blade, forceps, glassware etc), and clean working person (hair net, no food, washed hands, with gloves sterilized in ethanol). I'm just going to assume that the internet guide mentioned about things like flaming, negative air pressure etc. so I won't go on about that. Remember, the key to successful mushroom "cloning" is a sterile working environment.
Yaya, sterilize is the keyword, i just forgot how to spell it
Haha, not up to the stage of negetive pressure and ethanol yet, wash hand with dettol soap only, plus a candle flame to heat my cutting blade. And it mentioned about "a small area with still air" so I pick my bathroom as the workstation.
Oh? Am I sprouting spores? That is highly possible. As I have used parts from the fruiting body(mushroom cap) where they usually bear spores. According to the instruction, I tore the mushroom cap and extract the middle tissue as it is usually sterilized naturally. It seems like mycelium is sprouting out from the tiny piece of mushroom, spread like alien, not really sure if its spores sprouting.
Btw, I spent three days to sterilize my growing medium ^^ by theory, 100 degree celcius cant kill all spores(and now i know why those toilet ducks say kill 99.99% bacteria), and i do not plan to invest for a pressure cooker... so first day, steam 2 hours, let it cool overnite, the next day repeat the process, and repeat for three days. Suppose the spores survived the first cook, they will sprout overnite and wont survive the next one.
Its fun seeing those things grow, they even hv a fungus club for mushroom growers.
Oh, many of the mushroom growers is using the tedious method you mentioned to grow "seeds". Then use them to seeds mushroom bags.
100 degrees Celsius is not enough to kill spores... In lab, usually we use an autoclave at 131 degrees. Do note that spores are meant to survive to very worst of environmental conditions. Doing subsequent heating may kill any sprouted spores, but it could cause degradation of your media since you're using potato extract media, and not enriched agarose media. Still can work.
I'm not saying the mycelium you saw were sproting from spores, and I'm not saying it is not either. It may be fresh sprouts from your mushroom inner tissue. But in cloning, we never use differentiated cells (aka tissue from specialized body components), as differentiated cells rarely revert to the totipotent state (for instance Embryonic Stem Cells) without the input of hormones, restriction chemicals etc. Tissue from newly emerged sproutings will have a high density of undifferentiated cells, which can be coaxed to differentiate into the specialized cells and tissue under optimum growth conditions, and so these are used instead.
Yes, many mushroom producers are using the tedious method, as at the end of the day, you do want a uniform harvest of high performance crop and a low fluctuation in quality. And quality does pay off handsomely despite the difficulties faced. After all, that is the main purpose of cloning: To obtain planting materials of high quality, high uniformity and top performance with minimal fluctuation in standards from individual to individual.
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The media is the soup of boiled chopped potato, plus some expired glucose, plus agar agar.
Since we are discussing, I have always been curious about the hybrid seeds provided by seeds company, how did they produce large amount of seeds of same quality?
And also, some seeds are hard to germinate, what method can I use to wake them up from hibernation? For example, oil palm seeds? I did picked some palm fruit from some roadside palm trees and the seed has been lying in the soil for a few months now, perhaps its infertile?
Also, I has been collecting some wild castor seeds, am trying to germinate those bean-like seeds, but 100% failure. Seem like water is not the only thing they need.
Oil palm seeds take anywhere from 42 to 80 days to germinate under controlled conditions. In the wild, they may take up to 160 days even. Breaking the dormancy of oil palm seeds is a step wise process. Moisture is important, but so is the heat supplied. SIRIM standards are that after depulping, OP seeds must go through 42-80 days of heat treatment (HT) at a constant 40 degrees Celsius, with an internal moisture of 17-19%. After the HT, the internal moisture content should be raised to above 22%, and the seeds allowed to germinate at ambient temperature. Usually, germination takes place over a succession of weeks.
As for hybrid seeds, I'm assuming you mean cross species hybrid (from 2 or more different species), and not intervarietal breeds (same species, different variants). Eg of hybrids are the MAWA and MATAG coconut, eg of intervarietal breeds is the Tenera OP.
For uniform hybrid seeds, be it for any crop or plant species, the importance here is the selection of the parentals. At a glance, you take the top performing parents of either species, cross them, and carry out a Best Combining Ability analysis to determine which crosses produces the best progeny. Once identified, the parentals can then be traced back, and mass planted in seed gardens, thereby producing mass quantities of top performing progenies. However, uniformity here is still somewhat unbalanced due to minor varioations in genotypic makeup. But in breeding work, you would want some variation, as that is the only way to improve the material, short of genetic engineering.
Uniformity is a real challenge in the seed industry. Some seed producers actually clone the identified parentals and plant them out en masse, hence resulting in massive seed gardens which will all produce progeny that are of similar likeness amd performance, but still with some variations among them (you've got to know some college level genetics to understand this).
With annuals, seed production is not so much a challenge as the crop cycle is short; but with perennials, it is a huge challange, as the crops only yield their seeds after a really really long crop cycle. For instance, it takes only a couple months for chillies to yield its seeds (from emergence of inflorescence bud, till flowering, to pollination, to fruiting, to seed setting, and harvesting), whereas for coconut for instance, it takes about 1-1.5 years before seednuts can be harvested and germinated.
There is nothing wrong with oil palm seeds you collected, but then again, you wouldn't want to get those from the roadside as you wouldn't know which variant they are even though the palm is Tenera (again, you need to know some genetics to appreciate this). Same thing with the castor seeds; you need to give them the right conditions to allow for germination to take place. Do note that some species of plants have very specialized dormancy breaks, just as OP needs high heat and a cooling period to germinate, some seeds like castor (if not mistaken) need to be burned to break the dormancy. The heating breaks down the inhibitory enzymes causing the dormancy, and for certain hardshell seeds, the fire/heat cracks the seed coat to allow moisture entry.
Do read up more about the plant species that interests you. Not all crops are as simple to grow as sugarcane, bananas and papayas. A good source would be from FAO.
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Oooooh, very informative! Do you mind i post them in the agri thread @ jobs&careers?
Yes, I has been facinated by some species of plants that required burning to breed their next generation, as forest fire is part of the expected life cycle. Never thought castor might be related.
Pitaya is basically the only seed that I has raised successfully, no they not yet reach fruiting stage yet but they hv been growing pretty vigorously, I am thinking that our current planters are so involved into pitaya production, whether this cactus species will become an invasion species, it is such an adaptable species!
Most cactus dont show obvious growing in shade, but this pitaya keep growing until i need to trim them, in a pot.
I hv introduced you to the fish guy, Jonnie aka ParaOpticaL, he is eager to know you.
his MSN is jonnie91@hotmail.com
If you find it useful to others, then by all means please.. Haha...
Ya... Cactus species will become an agressive invader under such fertile environments. Just look at what the Prickly Pear Cactus did to Australia. And Australian land isn't really very fertile either.
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Note: Prickly Pear Cactus was brought into australia to plant around a farm as a living fence. However the Australia weather condition is so suitable to the cactus and soon it grown out of control and form an outbreak, covering significant area of farm lands and rendering they unusable therefore badly affecting food production.
Later they brought in a Moth species from where the cactus came from, and the Moth's caterpillar basically ate all the cactus and fixed the problem.
Dec 17 2007, 04:46 PM
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