Yes you can.

Brooke

I was told that if I did not stop selfing I would go blind! Sorry, I could not resist since it just sounds naughty to me. You may already have all this info, but I will post it anyway for those that do not.

Selfing is not only possible it is fairly common even in the wild. Some species have developed an adaptation to assure self pollination in the event of local conditions not producing pollinators. It is also the only economically viable way to produce seed pods of some particularly important varieties. Of course selfing in nature does little to promote diversity, so most flowers have evolved some strategies to reduce the likelihood of inadvertent self pollination. Most orchid flowers provide a manner of physical barrier in the design while others go to more elaborate means and include a failsafe by requiring a "ripening" period after the pollinia are removed before the stigmatic pool is receptive to pollination. Fortunately for us that is not the case in Vanilla but I think it is for some of the Stanhopea. Another aspect that may influence your success or failure is the maturity of the flower as well, older blooms in some cases may be much less receptive to fertilization than younger flowers.

It is really quite easy to accomplish, and in the case of your Sedirea the anatomy of the parts that are important is pretty straightforward though the quarters may be cramped. I have selfed a NOID Phal and produced a cross of a named and a NOID Phal last year just to see if I could be successful. Really a no brainer, but my staff had a time with me wearing a headlamp and loups while facilitating orchid sex with a toothpick. I still hear about it. After 4 months of close observation of a single large green pod all by itself on the spike I am fairly certain it was still not ripe though there did appear to be seed in it, so I "sowed" what I could at the base of the mother plant. It did not produce any plantlets, but I think the pod was far from ripe so I doubt the seed was viable. Oddly, I expected the flower itself to fail after pollination leaving only the ripening pod, but the mother plant was a Phal. with a heavy waxy substance and the flower remained intact at the end of the pod right up to the end. It was a little less spectacular than when first opened, but none the less it was there.

The moral of that story is that one of the tricks if you are going this alone and are not planning on using a flasking service will be getting the time just right for pod maturation (thankfully covered in the book). There are several strategies used to reduce contamination while plating the fertile seed on the media, one of which includes the use of green pods as opposed to fully ripe split seed pods, in which the yield may be reduced dramatically by the treatment needed to reduce contamination of the seed stock at that point. If you are using a flasking service they should be able to give you some guidelines as to what they like to work with and some ideas of when to harvest for plating.

I am still thinking about trying some crosses with some of my species plants, but later in life when I have more time to monkey with it. I have a fair amount of cell culture experience and many of those skills cross over easily to orchid seed culture. In addition I have ready access to an autoclave, a sterile hood and growth media as well as all the other miscellaneous bits so I will probably give it a go on my own as opposed to using a service, but that is my nature.

If you are unfamiliar with the actual process of hand pollinating this is a good link with good photos of the naughty bits.

Richard

Here is a link that might be useful: Hand Orchid Pollinating Illustrated

Awesome - thanks for the advice! I've crossed phals before (once actually) but I lost the seed because I put it in an envelope and threw it away accidentally!

Richard - LOL re headlamp! I'm surprised the flower remained after pollination - the one I tried died as the pod came out. I've heard of some techniques where a coffee filter can be used when the time is nearly right for ripening, to catch all the seed. Otherwise, I may do a green pod sowing, but that may be tricky. What do you do as a living? The only reason I would ever even *try* to attempt this is because I study in a research facility so I too have a hood, autoclave etc...might as well take advantage of it while I can!

Calvin here is the link to Big Leaf forum. About half way down the page you will see their propogation forum which contains much good information for you.

There are also several different WOC pictures available too. Great pics of many displays.

Enjoy your studying.

Brooke

Here is a link that might be useful: Big Leaf

Calvin,
In my previous life I did immunotoxicology (mostly related to cadmium) research as part of my undergraduate and graduate studies. I was sort of into membrane bound proteins and signal transduction but I got diverted in the midst of it all and am rather happy with how it ultimately turned out (Thank you wife and children), though I never did finish doctoral studies. I may still be on leave or whatever it was called, but I kind of doubt that as it was rather a long time ago. I keep pretty current with aspects of basic research that are interesting to me or that have relevance to my practice. I earn a living now as a Nurse Practitioner and I have a primary care clinic in northern Wisconsin.

By the way, that book I referenced is really great and has info related to a seed bank project. If I remember correctly part of the proceeds from the book sales are used to support the seed bank project. I just checked the OSB site and it looks like the next edition of the book may be out mid 2008, but it was a qualified maybe. Another book with more particulars on grow media is listed now too. Good hunting to you!

What about you?

Richard

Here is a link that might be useful: OSB Info

Apart from x self, you often see x sib (x sibling) on species orchids sales lists of orchid nurseries

"x sibling" might be preferable to x self in orchid breeding of species orchids.

Cannot remember seeing very many "x selfs" in the hybrid sections in years and years of reading orchid nursery Calalogues.

Arthur - maybe it's because if you self a hybrid, you may not get the same combination of genes, so a slightly different flower may arise, which most people don't want in hybrids and hence mericloning is better? Anyone know?

Richard - that's really interesting. I find that lots of the people here are some how involved in the sciences - maybe there's something to be said about the methodical analysis of factors and environments that accompanies clinical and research work that naturally draws us towards these relatively more challenging plants. We don't have many NPs in the south of Canada..why I have no idea since there is a severe shortage of doctors. I know that some states allow NPs autonomous practice - Wisconsin must be one of those!

What a coincidence that you were in immunotoxicology :) I specialized in immunology in my undergrad, and I'm doing my masters right now with a lab focusing on HIV - not sure what I'm doing afterwards yet but enjoying this while it lasts!

Calvin

This is a funny coincidence. The lab I started in was the main level 3 biocontainment facility at UCLA at that time, and we did the bulk of the HIV work then with a particular focus on IL-6. PCR and confocal microscopy was just getting going and I missed out on helping to set up a PCR facility there because I got distracted by ion channels, and moved over to work with a guy doing patch-clamp EP studies of voltage gated ion channels in rat myoblasts. I ran the tissue culture and did (tried to do) the mRNA separation and characterization hoping to find expression of a particular calcium channel and evaluate its role in differentiation of the myoblasts into myotubules.

Canada had looked at NPs quite some time ago, and the impression from all was overall very favorable, but the whole thing got squashed in the end in spite of the benefit and the movement never went anywhere. I remember bit of this because the paper reporting on that was one of the references I used when I sat for my comps.

I have a confession I once could not part with a bunch of media for my orchids, but did not want to re-use it without some processing, so I bagged up the lot of it and used my old manual steam autoclave that is still in the basement of my clinic and sterilized the batch in 2 loads. I have a new automatic steam system for instruments so I was not worried about basically trying to sterilize dirt in the autoclave I use for surgical instruments, what I had not counted on was the rather unique aroma produced by autoclaving a bark-CHC mix, and how long it might linger in the building. Happily it is not an offensive aroma, very earthy to be sure and it only was noticeable for a few days. I was able to quash any questions about the aroma without being implicated.

Good luck to you in your program.

Richard

For many extremely rare orchids, selfing is the only way to go. There are many instances where only one plant of a species has ever been collected and that plant had to be selfed. In the case of selfing a cattleya, many times certain characteristics will be intensified, like in the case of Lc. Bonanza 'Etta Gray'. It was selfed and produced 'Bold Adventure' which was way darker than Etta. Bold Adventure was selfed again to produce offspring that were even darker and had a boom period of early spring as opposed to late fall like the original Etta.

I selfed and crossed a Phal. last winter in February. I planted the seed in Sept, and now have some great looking little plants. I was disappointed that none of the crossed seed germinated. However, the selfed seed germinated well. I'm trying a link to one of my flasks...and my other flickr pix. I think my growth chamber at home is too cold, and is not climate controlled. I'm a hort. grad student, so may be bringing my babies to school to grow up.

Cannot see your pics. Says i must be signed in to view. Sometimes crossings never produce viable seed. Ploidy and stuff like that.... and sometimes the cross will only produce viable seed when one of the parents is used as the pod parent and will always fail if the other orchid is used as a pod parent.
As for why you do not see very many selfings of hybrids on orchid nursery lists....i cannot say, but there must be some disadvantages.

Richard - I take PCR for granted, especially now that we have all these Q-PCR and RTQ-PCR...and forget that in the good old days how amplification was done! It's a coincidence you worked on cytokines and HIV - I work on IFNalpha and HIV. Actually it's interesting we're having this discussion because I just found out one of my friends is planning on becoming an NP, and is going to pursue studies in the US after finishing a nursing degree here. Life is full of coincidences!

I'm planning on using the autoclave here to sterilize my media for this selfing project! Luckily it's only used for equipment and tips so hopefully I'm not breaching any sort of regulation or anything.

Toyo - that's interesting how the selfing managed to 'concentrate' certain traits!

Mdclark - I can't see your pics either :S

Arthur - it may be that deleterious genes get concentrated lowering seed viability. Perhaps a botany expert can enlighten us.

An update - I selfed my sedirea 2 weeks ago. The first change I noticed a week ago was that the entrance to the stigma closed off. 2 weeks later, the flowers have turned lime green (compared to the typical white), and the ovary has swollen slightly. Apparently this one's pods mature in about 100 days, so it looks like I can start experimenting this spring/summer!

Try this link for pics! I'll be thrilled if it works. Sorry, it isn't the same photo that I had tried before..but I'll try to upload those too.

Matt

Matt - sweet picture! That's really exciting - what medium did you use? Are you planning on replating soon? Let us know how you did it :)

I used a orchid seeding media for flasking the seeds from phytotechlabs. The response was pretty good. I then replated them early because I had a lot of contamination in most of my tubes, and had great germination but over crowding. To help mitigate that I flasked into these jars using a maintenance media. I also made some media at home with agar/sucrose/crushed activated charcoal/coconut water (canned) and some with banana puree. I recently also flasked ripe seed into my homemade media to see what sort of response I get.

Never given this compliment before mdclark, but Cool Protcorms dude! I read about the banana and coconut milk before and will be anxious to here how it goes. Something along these lines gets a mention in a story about a French grower in the book Orchid Fever: A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust, and Lunacy by Eric Hansen. Makes sense considering what is in the coconut milk in particular. I will be anxious to hear in part because I was wondering if the goodies in the coconut milk are heat stable. I had though about running some from fresh coconuts through a milipore but wonder if it might get too gummed up. If autoclaving media is not a problem I suppose most of whats in coconut milk would emerge intact after canning.

Okay..i updated some more pictures. I plan to get more protocorm shots
www.tc.umn.edu/~clark776 has the links

Matt