Inheritance of ‘ Meristic Variant ‘—A Mutant in Cotton Balasubrahmanyan R. Department of Agriculture, Madras Summary 1. A new meristic variant obtained by irradiating seeds of G. arboreum race indicum with X-ray is described. 2. Increases in the mean number of bracts, petals and boll loculi were registered as mutant characters. 3. If behaved as a recessive to normal. The pair of factors are designated M-m. 4. Its relation to other defective mutants, petal colour, glabrousness, lintlessness, and leaf-lobing was determined. No linkage was noticed. 5. In a cross between this meristic variant and female sterile type, a new mutant named ‘ no ovary ‘ possessing reduced number of boll loculi (often without the gynae-ceum itself) was spotted. It suggested that all the three recessive defective factors affecting one or other part of the gynaeceum, must have originated independently. Gene symbol g is proposed for the ‘ no ovary ‘ character. 6. Factor m was epistatic to g in intermutant crosses involving these two characters. Top |