Cultivar- Meaning and Types
Meaning and Definition
Cultivar is a contraction for cultivated variety and is synonymous with variety. A cultivar is a plant(s) selected for desirable characteristics that can be maintained by propagation.
- A cultivar is a kind of cultivated plant that people have selected for desired traits and when propagated retain those traits.
- A cultivar is also a unique population of plants, but it is artificially maintained by human efforts and is named. Many cultivars can not continue to exist without human effort.
- In fact, the word cultivar originated from the need to distinguish between wild plants and those with characteristics that arose in cultivation.
- Methods used to propagate cultivars include division, root and stem cuttings, offsets, grafting, tissue culture, or carefully controlled seed production.
- Most cultivars arise from purposeful human manipulation, but some originate from wild plants that have distinctive characteristics.
Type of Cultivars
- Sexually reproduced cultivars
- Asexually reproduced cultivars
Sexual Reproduction: Sexually reproduced cultivars are propagated by seed. The basic category is the line which is a population of seed propagated plants in which genetic variability is controlled and uniformity is maintained to a standard appropriate for that cultivar. These categories of cultivar include:
- Pure lines: If all descendants are from a single homozygous plant, it is termed as pure line.
- Inbred lines: are true breeding cultivars that result from enforced self-pollination of selected parent plants followed by continued selection to a desired type in succeeding generations. Once a desired cultivar of this type has been selected it is maintained by growing plants in isolation and allowing them to cross-pollinate or self-pollinate naturally.
- Composite or synthetic lines: A synthetic cultivar is composed of plants produced by combining a number of genetically distinct but phenotypically similar lines which have been allowed to cross-pollinate at random.
- Hybrid lines: is the F1 generation of the two inbred lines. Hybridization may be single cross (made between two inbred lines), double cross (two single crosses), top-cross (an inbred line and an open pollinated cultivar) and three-way cross (between a single cross and an inbred line).
- Provenances: certain mixtures as well as natural variants.
Asexual Reproduction: Asexually reproduced cultivars are propagated by methods like cuttings, division or grafting and such cultivar is known as clone.