The Color of Beans 2

A few years back I wrote a short post to introduced a project I had started to breed up a nicely blue colored dry bean. 

https://the-biologist-is-in.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-color-of-beans-1.html

The project as been moving forward nicely since then. This year's crop was very consistently blue in color, the first time I didn't harvest a large fraction of tan/blue seeds as well.

The picture at left looks very similar to the one I included in the post linked above, but this photo is from a few days ago. These beans are the extras I had saved from earlier generations, including many from 2018. This tells me the best blue colored seeds are able to maintain their color well in long-term storage.

The other truly blue varieties I have come across all seem to darken towards brown during storage. "San Berdardo Blue" and the rarer "Pragerhof" beans both have a nice blue color at harvest, but that color doesn't last. My blues keeping their color for a few years in storage is a nice improvement.

Over the first several years, I selected the best blue colored seeds from each harvest to plant the following spring. Until this year's harvest, each year I kept finding brown/tan seeds. This tells me the brown color was due to recessive alleles, which means it can be very hard to filter out the brown-seed trait. Any given blue seed could be hiding the recessive brown color allele.

This year I was lucky and the entire harvest had the rich blue color I had been working towards. The recessive allele for brown color could still be hiding among these. I won't be more certain I have finished filtering out that trait for at least a couple more years, but I am hopeful. Because I didn't have to select on color this year, I instead selected for larger seed size and pods (or pod clusters) with more seeds in them.

Right now I am working to figure out how I can distribute this new variety, but it may not happen this year. I have very limited seed stock and any method of selling or distributing them comes with some significant costs.

You can find more about these beans with the tag #BlueBeanProject on various social media systems. I'll also be writing more posts here, so stay tuned.

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I also have a couple new blue lines, unrelated to those above. These samples are F2s from a cross between "Pragerhof" and an unknown black bean.

One blue is darker than my main line and the other is lighter. I don't know for sure what these will become during the several years it will take to stabilize their genetics, but I aim to find out!

References:

1. https://the-biologist-is-in.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-color-of-beans.html
2. "San Berdardo Blue" beans: https://store.experimentalfarmnetwork.org/products/nonna-agness-blue-bean
3. "Pragerhof" beans: https://oroseeds.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/download-18.png
• No longer offered for sale by OroSeeds, but their photo remains online.