Bejo is going ahead with commercial release of the new Eastern-adapted hybrid tested as EXP3622. Here is a video we shot in the summer to show how it performs, including head to head with Eastern Crown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcH4wkioMMU
The new broccoli hybrid compares well to the competition.
This hybrid combines adaptation traits and architecture from the public breeding program of Cornell’s Philip Griffiths with the quality and productivity traits in Bejo’s commercial breeding program.
Commercial quantities of seed are available, but are not in 2025 catalogs. Contact your seed dealer for more information.
Important news: as of 2024 this popultation is available from the USDA Plant Germplasm Research Unit. It can be ordered under a single Plant Introduction number, PI 700926.
Here is the link: https://npgsweb.ars-grin.gov/gringlobal/accessiondetail?id=2138964
This accessibility makes this the most easily used mapping population for research program with limited capacity to do the breeding and seed increase usually required. You only need to phenotype for your trait.
The information about the population on the GRIN database included phenotype information for about 5000 traits. That is valuable for correlating your trait of interest with the overall variation in brassicas.
January 19,2025
The plant research community has a valuable and practical new resource available: a rapid-cycling Brassica oleracea population that can be used to map the genetics of many traits simply by phenotyping. The population and related resources are described in a recent publication led by Zach Stansell in Thomas Björkman’s lab at Cornell University.
The map and reference genome are complete
Bioinformatic-analysis pipeline is available
Seed is available for free
Researchers only need to phenotype and analyze
The BolTBDH population is derived from a from a cross of rapid-cycling Chinese kale with broccoli. It is particularly valuable for studying reproductive development because progeny lines have inflorescences that range from non-heading to fully heading broccoli. Variation is documented for many other traits, such as architecture and glucosinolate content, and variation in many others remains to be explored and documented.
Parents of BolTBDH: the rapid-cycling Chinese kale, TO1000 and the broccoli ‘Early Big’.
Zach Stansell has adapted his tool for breeders so that it is usable for any crop that has a highly subjective breeding goal.
Zach Stansell has developed an R package that helps breeders assess their criteria for subjective traits like beauty in many locations.
We are sharing the information with various media outlets. The first pass is a publication in the Cornell Chronicle.
Many horticultural crops need to meet the quality criteria of a particular market or of the main breeder. They need to meet those criteria in many environments. How can you test for quality in many locations at the same time. This technique is good at predicting the reference person’s quality score by having trained raters make objective measurements.
The package is posted on GitHub so that anyone can use it for free. It is annotated and revised to work with just about any trait of interest or any crop. The revision was done with Deniz Akdemir, Cornell statistician. The development of the method is published in HortScience (Stansell, Zachary, Thomas Björkman, Sandra Branham, David Couillard, and Mark W. Farnham. 2017. Use of a Quality Trait Index to Increase the Reliability of Phenotypic Evaluations in Broccoli HortScience 32:1490-1495. doi: 10.21273/HORTSCI12202-17 )
The Eastern Broccoli breeding pipeline is producing some great advances. Here is an inbred line from Mark Farnham’s program photographed in the depth of the South Carolina summer. Exceptional adaptation to Eastern summers in an inbred broccoli from the US Vegetable Laboratory in Charleston, SC. Photographed in mid-July 2016 following weeks of 90+ degree weather. Photo credit: Mark Farnham
In these growing conditions, existing varieties produce heads with significant distortion. Area growers currently don’t harvest until fall to beat the heat. This inbred can be the basis of an expanded production season.
This inbred is a candidate for a public release or protection by a Plant Variety Patent. It would be used as a parental line in a commercial hybrid variety to contribute unprecedented adaptation to the Eastern summer growing conditions. We are working with cooperating seed companies to that end.
