Question

If you purchase reproductive material for barley and hops, what is your expectation of those materials in terms of percentage of heterozygosity (high/low)? Explain your answer for each plant.

Answer 1

In this context, remember that there are around 100 or more varieties of hops and barley. In industry, breeders uses these kind of specimen to produce more every day. For that reason, they are looking for new varieties every day fort brewing characteristics. In this case, breeders wants plants that are disease resistance, high alpha acids levels and of course, high vigor.

Another requirement is that these plants must be storable since most of the alpha strains can dye during a couple of months and we will obtain just a low content of brewery.

For that reason is why hops plants have a high level of heterozygosity, since the homozygous indiividuals do not full fill the requirements of storageability, resistance and vigor.