North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Lucky Pittman <lucky.pittman@murraystate.edu>]

At 10:41 PM 11/22/2005, Lon wrote:
> It's about a solid half hour of typing to get everything in, so I'm going 
> to have to pass for now, at least.  Maybe in a couple days, after 
> Thanksgiving.

Here, Lon,
Let me save you some time & effort.  Here's an explanation you wrote, that 
I'd saved from way back - when we were on e-groups:
"Several years ago I went throught Jim Claypool's notes and used the results
to work out a theory of the inheritance of sex in American persimmons, to
take into account the appearance of limbs of opposite sex flowers on a tree
(limbs of male flowers on female trees, etc.).  For convenience, we decided
to call ordinary persimmons as having XX for female and XO for male, O being
the plant equivalent of a Y chromosome.  Though in truth I think there isn't
much difference between the X and O, only a very few genes.
     Opposite sex types had at least one of those chromosomes with a mutant
gene on it that coded for flowers of the opposite sex on the tree, and those
were X' and O'.  A tree that had X'X was a female that would have some limbs
of male flowers.  X'O was a male that would, in some cases, have small
seedless fruit on it.  X'X' was a female that had a strong tendency to
produce male limbs, while X'O' was a male that would produce perfect flowers
and normally seeded fruit.  Now, with the X'O', it was possible to
self-pollinate it and get trees that were O'O' and these, theoretically,
should be essentially perfect flowered types.  However, we don't have enough
test crosses to verify that.
    What it boils down to, is that it should be possible to cross the males
that produce perfect flowers and get some seedlings that produce ONLY
perfect flowers, or at least enough to make them truly useful, not just
something that takes up space once pollination is done.
    I hope this makes sense to all as it takes a LOT of writing to
re-explain the whole thing.  I am hopeful of doing a book on American
persimmons - kind of a new version of "Persimmons for Everyone" and will
include it in that when/if I can find a publisher.
-Lon Rombough"