PubMed · 2026-04-21
Scientists are exploring how plants naturally produce 'unreduced' pollen and eggs—reproductive cells that carry a full set of chromosomes instead of half—as a tool to breed tougher, more productive crops by crossing distant wild relatives with cultivated plants.
Unreduced gametes arise primarily through 'meiotic restitution,' a natural error in cell division that preserves the full chromosome set, and this process is the main driver of polyploidy (whole-genome duplication) in plants.
Manipulating unreduced gametes has already enabled difficult wide crosses between cultivated wheat and distantly related wild relatives that would otherwise be genetically incompatible.
The review identifies three key research priorities: decoding the molecular switches that trigger unreduced gamete formation, improving induction efficiency, and integrating the technique with modern genomics and breeding pipelines.
