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.
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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.
