Genetic characterization of spontaneous diploid androgenetic wheat and triticale plants

The homozygosity of spontaneous hexaploid plants derived from anther culture was evaluated in wheat and triticale by means of 18 and 22 microsatellite markers, respectively. Most of the spontaneous hexaploid plants were homozygous for all the loci tested and had chromosomes recombining for parental alleles. Only 12% of the spontaneous hexaploid wheat plants, 11% of the artificially doubled wheat plants and 4.4% of the spontaneous hexaploid triticale plants were heterozygous at one to three of the loci studied. This showed that spontaneous hexaploid plants mostly came from normal haploid cells, obtained after meiosis, that underwent spontaneous chromosome doubling. However, first or second division restitution, producing unreduced gametes, cannot be completely excluded to explain the origin of the spontaneous hexaploid plants. Cytomixis, involving only one chromosome, or development of aneuploid trisomic gametes, followed by chromosome doubling for the spontaneous hexaploid plants, or transposition events could also explain some of the results obtained.