Outcrossing rate in grain amaranths

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Abstract
Outcrossing rate was estimated in several collections of grain amaranths using three sets of data. The first involved a red-green seedling color locus (R,r); progenies of recessive mothers (rr) grown at Davis gave a wide range of values (mean rate of outocrossing 31 percent. SE = 25 percent). Famlities of plants collected at four sites in India gave estimates of 3.5 to 14 percent outcrossing at locus R/r. Using two allozyme loci, progenies of individual plants collected from fields in India and South America gave estimates of a 3 to 25 percent outcrossing rate, with significant interpopulation variation. This level of variation in breeding systems of grain amaranths should be of special interest in futher studies of its ecological and morphological components, and in relation to the effects of domestication on the breeding structure of different populations.