Corn Breeding- Xenia and Selection

Corn is unique compared to other grain crops in how easy it is to select by simple visual characteristic. The ear is a very large and obvious structure, so it is possible to make a strong selection on corn just based on ear characteristics alone. Combined with the fact that corn is monoecious, with separate male and female flowers, it is very easy to control how an ear is pollinated and by what other plant that pollen comes from.

The other major difference between corn and other grains is that corn exhibits xenia. Xenia means that corn can exhibit visible differences amongst individual seeds on an ear that correlate to specific genetic differences in them. So a white kernel is exhibiting a lack of genes for carotene pigments in the endosperm, or anthocyanin pigments in the aleurone.

In this video I am using the bright sunny morning we had to hand select out the darkest orange kernels on my flint corn seed board. The darkest kernels will be planted out in a separate nursery planting and I will self-pollinate them via hand pollination. Then I will select the best individual plants and ears from the nursery planting and plant those ears out as pollinator rows in my main flint planting in 2018. The rest of the planting will be detasselled to enable the dark orange pollinator rows to provide pollen for the entire planting. This will speed up the process of moving this corn population towards darker endosperm while enabling me to mass select for other important characters like stalk strength, husk coverage, insect tolerance, disease tolerance (especially for Northern Leaf Blight) and yield.