An Analysis of Heterosis VS. Inbreeding Effects with an Autotetraploid Cross-Fertilized Plant: MEDICAGO SATIVA L.

Self-fertilization and crossing were combined to produce a large number of levels of inbreeding and of degrees of kinship. The inbreeding effect increases with the complexity of the character and with its supposed relationship with fitness. A certain amount of heterozygosity appears to be necessary for the expression of variability. With crossing of unrelated noninbred plants, genetic variance is mainly additive, but with inbreeding its major part is nonadditive. High additivity in crossing, therefore, coexists with strong inbreeding depression. However, even in inbreeding the genetic coefficient of covariation among relatives appears to be strongly and linearly related to the classical coefficient of kinship. This means that deviations from the additive model with inbreeding could be partly due to an effect of inbreeding on variances through an effect on means. An attempt to analyze genetic effects from a theoretical model, based upon the identity by descent relationship at the level of means and of covariances between relatives, tends to show that allelic interactions are more important and nonallelic interactions are less important for a character closely related to fitness. For a complex character, these results lead to the conception of a genome organized in polygenic complementary blocks integrating epistasis and dominance. Some consequences for plant breeding are also discussed.