Spiral grain variation and inheritance were studied in maritime pine (Pinuspinaster Ait.) and Calabrian pine (Pinusnigra Arn. ssp. laricio var. calabrica) through radioisotopes (12K, 188Re) injected into the sap and autoradiography, on different types of material: mother trees in the forest, their open-pollinated progenies (10–14 years old), and the vegetative propagates (grafts) of the mother trees. For both species, spiral grain was always to the left in the grafts and seedling progenies but higher for the former. Broad sense and narrow sense heritabilities, and genetic prediction coefficient estimates were, respectively, 0.43, 0.16, 0.34 for maritime pine and 0.61, 0.58, 0.38, for Calabrian pine.Despite encouraging results, more research is needed to elucidate spiral grain variation along the stem and with time, before including this trait among the selection criteria.
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