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When different varieties of one plant species are crossed with each other, their hybrid offspring are often more robust and grow more quickly than their parents. However, in the next generation, this effect disappears again.

New methods make it possible to preserve the advantageous qualities of these kinds of hybrid plants for the long term and to deliberately design plants with four sets of chromosomes rather than two. The techniques should make it easier to breed particularly high-yielding and resistant crops that could feed a growing global population even in times of climate crisis.

As far back as 1759, more than a hundred years before the Austrian Augustinian monk Gregor Johann Mendel published his work on inheritance in peas, scientists were already pondering the question of how plants pass on their traits to their offspring.

It was during that year in St. Petersburg that a competition was held by the Russian Academy of Sciences. The task set was to prove that plants also possess sexuality.

The winner was Joseph Gottlieb Kölreuter, the son of a pharmacist from Sulz am Neckar. Kölreuter, who later became a professor of natural history in Karlsruhe, had crossed two inbred tobacco plants and, in doing so, had noticed that traits specific to each parent were present in the next generation after crossing.

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