Long's Peak Pinto Bean

Long's Peak Pinto Bean

David Sparks Ph.D.
David Sparks Ph.D.
The making of an upright pinto bean. Mark Brick, Professor of Plant Breeding and Genetics at Colorado State University has long been trying to figure out how to breed an upright pinto bean. "Breeding an upright pinto meant using the best of bean worlds. We had to make crosses between the upright, tropical types with small seeds and the large-seeded highland varieties.

While the initial crosses yielded some plants with upright architecture, breeders had difficulties with seed size. Seed size is a vital feature of how marketable a bean variety is.Researchers used a process called recurrent selection, where they continued to interbreed the upright plants with small seeds and select the offspring with the largest seeds for the next breeding cycle. Each generation of intercrossing, you can slowly make progress not only on seed size and upright architecture, but other traits such as yield and disease resistance.

Long's Peak has been a long time in the making. Brick, and other researchers across the U.S., have been working for more than three decades to generate upright pinto beans with large seeds, high yield, good color, and pest resistance.

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