Hop is a dioecious perennial plant, cultivated for its female inflorescences. Spontaneously arising monoecious hop plants, carrying male and female flower types on a specific plant, occasionally occur in the progeny of certain hop crosses. We assessed the ploidy of 58 monoecious plants, progenies of various crosses of diploid parents, to provide additional data on hop monoeciousy. Flow cytometric analysis revealed that a high percentage (41.4%) were triploid. An inheritance analysis of parental alleles using six codominant SSR markers demonstrated a primarily paternal origin (84.2%) of unreduced gametes as the cause of triploidy in monoecious plants. The predominantly male phenotype with a few female cones appears to be linked to triploidy in monoecious hops, since this phenotype was found only among triploid intersexes, and vice versa. All other monoecious plants were diploid, except for one genotype with the highest nuclear DNA content, which showed an aneuploidic number of chromosomes (21). Male hops showed the lowest nuclear DNA amount, as measured by DAPI and propidium iodide fluorochromes. The estimated AT frequency placed hop among species with a high AT content, which was slightly higher in male than in female plants (63.0% vs. 62.5%).
COBISS.SI-ID: 7165817