A hybrid of Mirabilis Jalapa

If you've ever heard of Gregor Johann Mendel, then you must be knowing he is the first person to show experimental evidence of inheritance. Thanks to him, now we all know many things about how a certain characteristics is transferred from parents to their children. We know him as the father of Genetics.

This blog is about my experiment of inheritance and cross pollination, similar to that of Mendel's. Mendel did that with pea plants and I tried with Mirabilis Jalapa, aka 4O'clock plant.

This plant is abundant in India and shows many distinguishable, observable and verifiable characteristics which makes it one of the best plants to conduct experiment with. This plant comes in 3 different varieties (as per my knowledge), White, Yellow and Red based upon their flower color. Easily observable characteristics of this plant are:

1. Color of the flower
2. Color of the stem

The Red variety is the most abundant one, yellow is comparatively rarer and white is very rare (I think that it might be extinct now). Well, this abundance/rarity is from my perspective, just based upon the no. of plants of those varieties I've seen so far.

This is something I started about 8 or may be 9 years back. I was studying in class 12^th and came across Mendel's experiment and then it struck me that 4O'clock plant will be suitable for the study for following reasons.

1. The plant grows fast and flowers early, hence takes less time to collect results (of course you don't want to experiment with a mango plant, else your grand children will be collecting results for you)
2. The seeds grow easily and fast and takes little effort to maintain
3. The plant has easily distinguishable male and female parts and hence the pollination process can be easily managed for a desired mix
4. The plant has many easily observable characteristics to determine the plant variety

My plan was to mix different varieties and see what I'm getting. It takes sometime and few generations to observer the results. Initially it was difficult as I had few seeds like 6-8 seeds and not enough space to plant all of them to see individual results and each plant didn't survive. Initially I had only Red variety, then I managed to get the White variety and much later the Yellow variety. I tried few things and the results were spectacular, amazing and trust me I can't even explain how I felt. Here are few pictures.

These pics are actually pretty recent ones and are very similar to what I had got initially. I also got many other exciting results but sadly I don't have the photos. Before getting to the results, let me tell you characteristics of the pure varieties, the red, yellow and white only varieties.

Type	Flower color	Stem color
Red	Red	Red
Yellow	Yellow	Green
White	White	Green

The results I found are as follows:-

1. Red & Yellow cross: The hybrid plant's stem color is Green and flower color is Yellow with Red spots. It looks like that Yellow is dominant and Red is recessive. I also noticed that the Yellow plants were finding it difficult to grow on the soil but the Red ones were growing strong. And the hybrid ones were growing strongly. So, the hybrid got advantage of the recessive, the Red one. In biology, this is called Incomplete Dominance.
2. White & Red cross: The stem color is Green and flower color is Pink. It looks like both traits were able to express themselves almost equally. This is called Co-Dominance.

I'm really happy about the whole experience. But at the end of the day I'm also equally disappointment. I no longer have the pure variety of yellow and white. I could have many more no of combinations of colors. If in case you've any of these two pure varieties (Yellow, White) I'll be very happy if you could share them. I think the whole experience was very exciting and the best part was never knowing what you're going to get in the future. Even the same combination of plants may flower differently, who knows. And yes, your comments are as always welcome.