<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <docID>341710</docID> <postdate>2025-04-03 09:23:27</postdate> <headline>Weird way to grow sunflowers faster revealed</headline> <body><p><img class="size-full wp-image-341711" src="https://citynews.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/20250301114425628436-original-resized.jpg" alt="" width="900" height="600" /></p> <caption>Researchers have developed a simplified breeding process for sunflowers. (Mick Tsikas/AAP PHOTOS)</caption> <p><span class="kicker-line">By <strong>Luke Costin</strong></span></p> <p><strong>Seeing a sea of sunflowers across Australian paddocks could become a more regular sight due to a quirky breeding discovery.</strong></p> <p>Research published in eminent journal Nature on Thursday revealed researchers have developed a simplified breeding process.</p> <p>As well as being wildly popular, sunflower is the world's third-largest oilseed crop and provides edible seeds for humans and domestic birds.</p> <p>The new method involves chemically emasculating the sunflower crop after researchers found nutrient-rich endosperm that nourishes the embryo of the flower may not be necessary.</p> <p>The Chinese and American experts behind the research propose the important nutrients may be stored elsewhere in the seed.</p> <p>The single-parent seeds flowered as usual, but the researchers did not observe them generate any pollen.</p> <p>It could cut the time it takes to produce viable inbred sunflower crops from about six annual cycles of self-pollination to 10 months, the researchers suggest.</p> <p>But they caution it could be dependent on certain sunflower genomes.</p> <p>Further research would be necessary to determine if this strategy of chemically emasculation or induced parthenogenesis could be used in other economically important crops.</p> <p>"Much remains to be discovered about the range of reproductive modes used by all flowering plants, including well-studied crop species," the researchers said in the peer-reviewed paper.</p> <p>"It is surprising that parthenogenesis operates independent of apomixis (a form of asexual reproduction) and that viable seeds form, absent fertilised endosperm in sunflower.</p> <p>"We hypothesise that in sunflower, parthenogenesis may serve as an escape from male sterility in conditions of environmental stress, a fortuitous accident."</p> <p>The study is published in Nature.</p> </body>