Evaluation of open-pollinated offspring in Cyclamen persicum using vegetative phenology models in a primitive breeding population

Avaliação da prole de polinização aberta em Cyclamen persicum usando modelos de fenologia vegetativa em uma população reprodutiva primitiva

Abstract

Cyclamen is commercially cultivated to produce the pot and garden flowering plants by sowing the seeds, and the number of leaves is an important trait for the beginning of the initiations of flower buds and flowering. The yield potential is affected by the life cycle of a plant and the plant breeders can have good decisions making with the prediction of plant phenology. In this study, a polynomial function was proposed for modeling behavior of cyclamen offspring during the vegetative growth. This modeling is based on information on environmental changes and plant morphology up to the flowering stage. For this purpose, 30 pots (individuals) from a 121-individual population, which were the same in the size, were considered for sampling of data. The data were recorded as time series that include temperature (°C), relative humidity (%), leaf width (mm) and number of leaves. The output of this model is the number of leaves and the recorded inputs are the time (growth cycle; days), temperature, relative humidity and leaf width. Using the Quantum-behaved Particle Swarm Optimization (QPSO) algorithm, the constant coefficients of the proposed function (linear model) was calculated to match the input and output values to each other. To illustrate the robustness and efficiency of model, the growth rates of all individuals were compared using this proposed model. The result of root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and coefficient of determination (R ² ) between the estimated and observed values for each individual showed that 63% of the tested open-pollinated (OP) population is marketable. Therefore, phenology model could be a good estimation of the vigor of the OP population for commercial production. It should be noted that in obtaining the model, only five individuals were used randomly as training data, and the obtained model was fitted to the others as test dataset without changing the coefficients. Furthermore, a Gaussian model of the whole dataset showed that the OP seeds of cyclamen could be utilized to produce the potted flowering cyclamen without any worry about non-uniformity of harvest for the market if the optimum temperature would be adjusted.

Keywords:
Primulaceae; flowering; growth rate; humidity; model; temperature