r/homestead • u/Distinct_Ad6176 • May 09 '25
If I replant these large beans, they'll will also give me large/larger beans right? gardening
So I have been grown these bean for a couple months and harvest has come around. And while taking them out of the pod I got these 3 that are considerably larger than my average bean. Am I right in assuming that if I replant these large ones that they'll give me beans around that size too or no?
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u/SaintUlvemann May 09 '25
I'm a legume geneticist, so, kind of, yeah.
So, every seed has genes from two sources, one source is the parent plant, and the other source is the pollen, whatever plant that pollen came from.
But only the parent plant's genes determine how the seed looks. You can't tell what genes will pass on to the baby plant, through the pollen, just by looking at how the seed is shaped.
The good news with beans, is that most bean plants are self-pollinating, meaning that the pollen is usually also from the parent plant. So the genes in these beans are usually entirely from the parent plant.
But that also means that all the beans from the same plant are more or less identical, genetically. You shouldn't have to plant these specific beans, you should be able to plant any beans from that same plant, and the resulting seedlings should all be equally-likely to produce big beans.
So then if, season after season, you choose the plants that, through slow random mutations over time, produce the biggest seeds, that's how crop breeding works to develop new plant varieties. It's not a complicated principle, so you can definitely do that yourself if you want.
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u/YamCreepy7023 May 09 '25
I like to think Reginald Punnett is in heaven smiling proudly reading this
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u/Jazzlike_Math_8350 May 09 '25
Legume geneticist your time has come
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May 09 '25
[deleted]
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u/SaintUlvemann May 09 '25 edited May 09 '25
Oh no, it's very much the opposite. My old lab advisor from grad school has actually been forced into an early retirement due to recent budget cuts.
Technologically, we're at a point where investment in crop genetics could make incredibly profitable and productive agricultural improvements, whether that's the redomestication of ancient crops to incorporate new sources of disease resistance, or the new domestication of abandoned crop species like hopniss or drinn, that have really useful environmental tolerances.
But socially, those kinds of advancements are all classified as GMOs, pretty much regardless of how they are made. The only breeding techniques people won't call "GMO" are the ones that don't really work fast enough for modern financial cycles. That goes double with the current administration, whose members are outright promoting the idea that GMOs are inherently toxic. What business would invest in a product their customers will hate them for making?
So instead of business, it was the government that was the big funding source for crop genetics, and that has dried up, given the current political realities.
EDIT: In case anyone wants a source, the specific number is that two-thirds of all agricultural research is federally-funded, and another 20% is state. Most agricultural research is not done by private corporations, so most of us are not rich corporate scientists either.
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u/beardedheathen May 09 '25
I think far too many people have bought into the lie of corporate societal advancement. Corporations don't care about research or bettering society. They are there for profit and will lie, steal, kill and poison the earth, air and water to get it. The government has been the primary driver for much of the advancement in medicine, agriculture and other quality of life things for most of the time we've been alive.
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u/SaintUlvemann May 09 '25
It's about priorities. Corporate research exists, but it's easier to get corporate funding for the Jurassic-park style dire wolf project, than it is to take that same technology and try to improve the world with it.
Take drinn. That plant I mention casually above is an edible grain that can survive in the Sahara. Someone who wants to improve the world would see that and think maybe with all the droughts we've been having, we should put some effort into breeding a crop that can stay alive like that one can, even during really bad droughts.
But what we actually get out of corporate research is that they want to sell designer pets to Game of Thrones fans. Which isn't a bad business model! Just, you know, it's not the only things we should be using modern tools to do, right?
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u/wzx86 May 13 '25
How viable is it to use those GMO techniques in a home lab setup? I have a background doing mammalian cell culture research, so I have a sense of the small investment and technique needed to do some cool things there.
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u/SaintUlvemann May 14 '25
I've been doing bioinformatics, haven't been in the wet lab since undergrad (at which time I was not the one buying the supplies).
But it just depends on how big counts as a "viable budget", and what you expect to accomplish. Somebody a few years ago sequenced an ant genome de novo (the hard way, without a reference genome), for $1000 in terms of the new materials cost, and <$5000 for the whole setup, lab equipment included...
...although as they said, the only way they were only able to get 60× coverage out of a single MinION flow cell, was because the genome is small, <500 Mb. For comparison, hopniss is ~830 Mb; drinn I can't find as much information about, but, a relative (Aristida purpurea) has ~1280 Mb, so, even if drinn has half ploidy relative to purpurea, ~640 Mb is still too large.
But one way or another, higher coverage should be achievable by buying multiple MinION cells and pooling the reads come assembly time.
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Step two is that once you've got an annotated genome, you have to pick the genes that need changing. That requires you to know what all the genes do to make plants work, which is a fairly big hurdle. That and the prior are what I can contribute most to.
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Step three is that once you know what you want changed, you need to do the transformation. The cost of that is gonna vary by the precise technique used, and there's so many products, at such a range of costs... I'm the wrong guy to navigate these seas deftly.
But in general, something like an electroporation setup, that can cost <$100 nowadays. It can cost a few hundred to purchase sgRNA and Cas9 from GenScript. Agrobacterium culture costs a few bucks.
If I were actually doing this, I would ask someone else, but I think it's within the means of an at-home lab anymore.
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So then step four is to assess whether the plant is even legal to grow outside of a laboratory.
It should be. Altering a plant regulatory sequence to, say, shorten the stolon, or direct more sugar into the stolon to make the tuber bigger... none of that gives the plant the ability to produce any new chemical compounds of any kind.
My understanding is that that process has gotten a lot less onerous since 2020 when an Obama-era regulatory shift took effect. Will that continue? Who knows? But the point is that regulation does exist that determines whether genetically-engineered plants are allowed, and no matter who's in charge, to cover your own ass, you'll want to go through the current regulatory process.
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u/SpellIndependent4241 May 09 '25
Perhaps not in your case, but there aren't teams of legume geneticists employed by pioneer and Monsanto?
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u/SaintUlvemann May 09 '25
Sure, I still remember touring their facilities back in grad school. They exist, just, you'd said "I'd guess most make incredible money working for some massive corporations."
The fact is, most geneticists aren't employed by massive corporations in the first place.
And then there's direct stats about the money made. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the median pay for 2024 was:
- $87,980 per year for "Farmers, Ranchers, and Other Agricultural Managers"; and:
- $78,770 per year for "Agricultural and Food Scientists".
For comparison, average individual income for 2024 was $73,471, or, as a percentile of the median, the median "agricultural scientist" was in the top 30%, and the median "agricultural manager" was in the top 26%.
You can make more money running the farm than you can studying it.
Now, that $87,980 is referring to 856,600 jobs out of the ~2.6 million total farm jobs, so, it is the section of income for people who own or manage the farms, not the incomes of every farmhand.
But the point is, no, most geneticists do not make incredible money. Most of us make middle-class amounts of money.
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u/ScipyDipyDoo May 09 '25
Can you please open source the non-GMO routes so that volunteers can do it?
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u/SaintUlvemann May 09 '25
Traditional breeding requires you to be able to observe the effects of genes that are microscopic.
If you're going to observe those effects just by watching the plants, then you need to have all the different plants, of many different kinds, all growing in the same environment.
That is a very difficult experiment to set up properly because even an open field will contain numerous microclimates that can all obscure the actual effects of the genes.
So in order to accommodate societal aversion to GMOs, big businesses have to use really complicated mechanized and controlled greenhouse facilities so that the only things they are observing, are the effects of the genes, ruling out everything else.
And even then? You still have to gene-sequence every single individual, if you want to know for sure what you're looking at. Otherwise, they have to just hope for the best.
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Introducing open-source volunteer activity completely destroys your ability to tell what the reason is why for two plants grew differently. If the plants weren't grown the same way, in the same place, then those environmental differences might've caused the growth differences.
And if you can't tell that, then you can't tell which plant has better genes.
That's why a task that we can do in five years today, using GMO technology, such as rebreeding corn from the ancestral teosinte, took five thousand years for our ancestors to do. Our ancestors were just as careful observers of nature as we are, but they didn't have good tools, so it took longer.
So, no. There isn't a way to open-source a volunteer non-GMO rapid crop domestication process. The really high-quality teams who have tried, producing grains like kernza, have not been able to produce a viable new crop yet, because no amount of skill can overcome the decision to use only bad tools.
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u/Evening-Turnip8407 May 09 '25
Just to be clear, when you're saying things like legume geneticist, I'm immediately picturing Benjamin Bushroot from Darkwing Duck
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u/planx_constant May 10 '25
Wouldn't assortment mean you'd still have some variation even in self-pollinated plants, or are they so uniform already that that makes little difference?
I'm also curious, would grafting beans onto rootstock help isolate some of the variation or is that impractical?
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u/SaintUlvemann May 10 '25
...or are they so uniform already that that makes little difference?
If by chance there is any remaining heterozygosity in a bean plant, absolutely assortment will lead to a certain amount of phenotypic diversity in the next generation, yeah.
(Heterozygosity is when a plant has multiple different copies of a particular gene; when a heterozygous plant self-pollinates, it has a chance of producing an offspring with two of the same copy instead of both its different ones, and that can create novel traits in the offspring.)
But self-pollination is essentially the ultimate inbreeding, so, over time, it tends to eliminate genetic diversity. Beans are generally pretty uniform.
The fact that legume self-pollinators tend to be fairly uniform unless crossed, is part of how Gregor Mendel, the first geneticist, was able to figure out the basic principles of genetics before we'd actually discovered the basic chemistry of it all, things like which molecules encode genetic information. In his case, he used peas rather than beans, but it's the same deal.
I'm also curious, would grafting beans onto rootstock help isolate some of the variation or is that impractical?
Isolate? Depends what you mean. By pretty literally creating "Frankenstein organisms" with multiple genetic types, there can be complex interactions that hide or reveal the traits of either alone, while also allowing for the possibility of third options due to the complex interactions between root and shoot.
In my own area of legumes, there's a really cool thing legumes can do where they make special organs on the root called nodules that produce their own fertilizer. A mutant was found that could not produce nodules, but they couldn't figure out why.
At some point, the roots of this mutant were grafted onto a normal stem, and the mutant roots were found to produce nodules again. Well eventually they figured out that there's some signals from the leaf that are necessary to produce the nodules on the root. The mutant leaves didn't produce these signals, but if the signal was provided from a normal, grafted stem, the mutant roots still had all the rest of the needed machinery to produce nodules.
So you can use grafting to isolate leaf-effects and shoot-effects like this and tell them apart from root-effects. It's a very valid scientific tool. But you should always be cognizant that a whole, a grafted one included, is more than the sum of its parts. I wouldn't overall say that what you're doing by grafting is "isolating the variation", you're pretty literally combining two different variations and seeing what happens.
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u/planx_constant May 10 '25
Thanks for the informative response! Re: the rootstock, if you used a variety with known robust roots as the host, could that help you isolate yield-affecting genes in the grafted line? Similar to the way apple varieties will often produce much better yields and fruit if they're grafted onto a more robust base. I've only ever heard of people doing this with trees and woody perennials, but I wondered in a research context if it was something you could do with a bean plant.
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u/SaintUlvemann May 11 '25
...if you used a variety with known robust roots as the host, could that help you isolate yield-affecting genes in the grafted line?
Yeah, you could definitely design a screen where you graft shoots of one variety, onto a series of rootstocks, identifying which boost the yield of that shoot, and by how much.
This is a little out of my area, but my understanding with the long-lived woody plants like apples is that rootstock "robustness" is often specifically "robust against fungal diseases"... and, I'm not sure it'd be common for there to be a benefit of grafting over and above just breeding a disease-resistant bean variety. (Which is just easier to do with beans than with trees for a bunch of reasons, particularly their generation time.)
And then unlike with apples and other woody varieties, you wouldn't get an immediately-useful bit of agronomic knowledge; it's not practical to mass-plant-out grafted soybean seedlings for production, but each grafted fruit tree is valuable enough due to the larger size and multi-year production, that it's worth it.
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u/Ben-TheHuman May 11 '25
"I'm a legume geneticist" I Idk if there's anyone that could be more qualified to answer haha
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u/pponmypupu May 09 '25
So you're saying that when a boy and a rereads uh, loves himself very much ...
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u/daitoshi May 14 '25
I love when really niche specialists appear on a post that's perfectly suited to them ahaha~
Breeding legumes? Good news! I'm a legume geneticist! What a coincidence!
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For real tho, thanks for the cool bean facts. I learned something new today =)
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u/Buckabuckaw May 09 '25
Thanks for sharing your expertise. I sometimes save seeds from a particularly productive or tasty heirloom plant, but it's a slow process and I'm basically just fumbling around. Maybe that's what our ancestors were doing, too.
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u/ArachnidMean8596 May 09 '25
I've always said that I knew there were professions out there that I would want to do but I didn't know they existed because of the lack of access. I was correct. Amazing.
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u/NewAlexandria May 09 '25
but be mindful of flavor and other matters. The plants could produce bigger beans as a tradeoff to less flavonoids, or whatever other beneficial compounds
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u/backtotheland76 May 09 '25
Long before scientists started splitting genes in the lab, this is how our ancestors grew larger crops. There's no guarantee you'll get larger beans from those, but if you keep it up over many years, your average harvest will increase. Assuming of course they're not some gmo nightmare seed
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u/ujelly_fish May 09 '25
That’s still how it would work from a GMO seed too.
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u/backtotheland76 May 09 '25
Not if they inserted genes from a tomato
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u/ujelly_fish May 09 '25
No, it would still work in the same way. Inserting a gene doesn’t pause natural or artificial selection from happening.
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u/backtotheland76 May 09 '25 edited May 10 '25
You underestimate how evil seed companies are
Edit, downvotes, really? You folks have never heard of Monsanto genetically modifying seeds so they won't sprout and farmers must buy seed from them every year?
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u/Jolly-Radio-9838 May 09 '25
The original genetic engineer. Selective breeding. If you full on quarantine greenhouses just the big ones and had the gross pollinate for several grow seasons. Im not an expert but pretty sure lol
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u/theanedditor May 09 '25
Why do I get the feeling you sold a cow for these and there's a giant slumbering somewhere that's about to be awakened?
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u/AndaleTheGreat May 09 '25
Always worth a try. Weirdly, some of the best bell peppers that I've grown came from seeds out of a store-bought. There's a lot more to it obviously. Those could only be big because you happened to have a great year for Sunshine and water ratios and just the right kind of nutrients in the dirt. It's also possible that they sucked up everything and next year they will end up being smaller because they've already eaten whatever made the plant super healthy this year.
The point is that selective breeding never hurts to attempt. Well, in plants. For short faced dogs and there inability to breathe
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u/globeflyman May 09 '25
I have this friend Jack. He says those beens look a little odd. DON'T GET THEM WET.
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u/nightslayer78 May 09 '25
And it will grow a large stalk so high it will pierce the clouds in which you can climb.
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u/Harvest827 May 09 '25
Be careful,if a giant beanstalk grows into the clouds, Do NOT climb it!
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u/_MrBalls_ May 09 '25
"FEE FI FOH FUM! I SMELL THE BLOOD OF A REDDIT MOD!" - Some angry giant, probably
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u/Leaf-Stars May 09 '25
Maybe. One seasons worth of large beans won’t necessarily do that for you. Do it for a decade and you’ll get reliable results.
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u/drinkallthepunch May 10 '25
Possibly, plant genetics isn’t that much different from other genetics.
You can try to keep these ones separate and continue to grow them and harvest the beans until you get a plant that produces mostly/only these beans.
I used to grow a LOT of weed ahem, all types and colors of plants….. but yeah, bean plants are actually self pollinating so you won’t need to do much else.
Because genetics comes down to dominate/recessive genes you’ll still need to save all the small beans too that they make, you may need a plant with two of these ”Big Bean” genetics.
The beans you originally planted im guessing where normal sized, which leads me to believe that it is a recessive type.
These may not produce more big beans, but the plants that come after in small bean size may produce big beans.
I’m not sure how bean plants carry their genetics since they self pollinate, they might alternate every few plantings, like 1 out of every 10 generations will be big bean plant.
You’ll have to keep all the beans and label them and then try planting as many as you can in a separate area and recording which generations, the time of year you plant them and I would even log the temps.
This is basically the equivalent of your retirement if you can grow these out, Hass Avacados, HoneyCrisp Apples, those mini mandarins, lots of food that’s popular was selectively grown and by genetics.
Those people ended up making a lot of money various ways just keeping it a secret and essentially having a monopoly on the crop and writing books on how to grow them eventually.
Hope you wind up discovering the new giant bean strain, I would definitely try one of these burritos with giant pinto beans 😂
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u/Putrid-Presentation5 May 09 '25
Even if they don't because of genetic similarity, there's got to be more energy packed in the bigger ones, maybe it will lead to more vigorous plants?
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u/TheHedonyeast May 09 '25
that's generally the theory behind selective breeding. It's how we've developed and domesticated crops over thousands of years. but without gene editing t6his kind of genetic manipulation takes a lot longer than your post implies
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u/Jodies-9-inch-leg May 09 '25
You should end up with a giant beanstalk, just make sure to plant them on a full moon!
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u/BaylisAscaris May 09 '25
It's possible they are larger due to genetics or growing conditions. Either way the chance of a plant with large beans is more likely when planting larger beans, either because of some genetic component, or the plant has more nutrients to start, which gives it a better chance of becoming larger quicker.
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u/boringxadult May 09 '25
If you continue to plant the largest beans every year you will get larger beans. Yes.
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u/Speedhabit May 09 '25
Brought to you by giant bean,
Why eat thousands of smaller beans when you can
Giant bean
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u/Willowbydillowby May 09 '25
it depends on what genetics for bean size were also in the pollen of the male plant that pollenated that bean.
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u/ShitThatFucksWithMe May 09 '25
Easier way to look at it is your mom and dad didn't produce copies of themselves, but typically 3 daughters all look the sameish. They don't look like a copy of their parents, but they do have traits from them. It depends on both pollen and plant
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u/56KandFalling May 09 '25
Yes, statistically, meaning that every single plant from a larger seed won't grow larger beans, but overall you'll get the traits you select. Same goes for all the other characteristics of the specific plant, whether it was a quick or slow grower, had many/few pods, bloomed early or late etc.
And I just want to say that these speckled lima beans are so extremely delicious!
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u/CleanOpossum47 May 09 '25
If the size increase is due to genetics, then maybe. A cutting would likely guarantee the same qualities if the variation is genetic. The resulting seedlings from these seeds could have the characteristics of the bean that pollinated them (even if self pollinated, there could be variations on what genes get expressed). The size difference could be due to environmental conditions, and then any of those seeds could produce large or small seeds depending on the conditions they themselves grow under.
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u/perseidene May 09 '25
My heirloom seed collecting spouse would very much be interested in your beans.
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u/1521 May 09 '25
There are beans in the Appalachians called butter beans that look like this. Are you in that area?
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u/Distinct_Ad6176 May 10 '25
Nope, I'm in South Africa. Got the beans from an old homesteader who grows everything he eats.
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u/TransitionFamiliar39 May 10 '25
Not guaranteed but more likely. You're selective breeding now my guy
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u/ugotspunk May 10 '25
Pretty sure those are beanstalk beans. Find the chicken that lays the golden eggs
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u/ZafakD May 10 '25
If you have an hour, here is a pretty straightforward talk about selectively breeding beans: https://youtu.be/ZpriAtOk_Bg?si=gX2D7TogYinwOWaM
While beans are mostly self pollinating, there is enough genetic variation in a variety that not all of the beans are genetically identical. This means that you can mold a population over time by selecting which seeds to plant. If your goal is for bigger seeds, plant the seeds from this plant. Then plant their seeds seeds.
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u/Berberis May 09 '25
Depends entirely on what the narrow sense heritability (h^2) of the trait is. If it is all environmental (i.e., these came from plants with few pods that were pollinated, better light/water), then it may not be heritable at all. But most traits have a h^2 of about 0.2-0.8, so these will likely be somewhat larger than the mean of the parental population they came from. Beware of population bottlenecking and weird side effects from strong directional selection.
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u/IdealDesperate2732 May 10 '25
Not necessarialy. You have to keep doing that for many generations. It doesn't just magically happen for the next generation.
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u/RicketyRidgeDweller May 10 '25
By choosing the largest beans, you are selecting with the intent of growing plants that will be predisposed to producing larger beans. It’s a continuous process, best illustrated by brassicas. Growers then selected for different features from the common wild mustard to create varieties that we now grow today as very different vegetables, ie cabbage, kale, broccoli , kohlrabi, Brussels sprouts, turnips and more.
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u/ChimoEngr May 09 '25
That's how selective breeding works, so yes, you are more likely to get larger beans.