When breeding Hot Peppers with Sweet Peppers, Can I determine the Heat level of the next generation by licking the seeds only? The seeds themselves aren’t mother material right? But are the Capsaicin Glads that cause Pepper seeds to be covered in Capsaicin juice, mother material too?
If I pollinate Hot Pepper Pollen onto a Heatless Bell Pepper, will the seeds inside be hot or not? In theory the Heatless Bell Peppers (Mother Material) isn’t capable of Leaching Capsaicin onto the hybrid seeds through its capsaicin glads right? In other words can the hybrid seeds themselves taste hot without being covered in capsaicin from the mother plant’s fruit?
If you mean that you determine hotness of individual seeds, no. You can’t even determine from lickeng seeds how hot said mother plant is. Milder varieties leach only minimal amounts of capsaicin and humans don’t have specifically accurate senses to determine heat level. Heat level can vary even between fruits of the same plant due to conditions so you might get heatless at one time and hots later without that it is passed on to the next generation.
Is this because seedcoat is also mother material too? Or is this because the seeds themselves can’t produce capsaicin?
This idea came to me when I was organizing my hot Pepper seeds & touched my eye. I also likced some seeds & confirmed they were hot. I understand seeds are formed by Pollen x Ovary thus seeds are the only part of the fruit to contain father parent genes.
Very interesting, so the heatless individual peppers of Dried Aji Amarillo I found from the Mexican Grocery Store will likely grow into hot peppers too? I even ate the placenta (Which confrims heat level, it was heatless).
Are you sayng that selecting within my Aji amarilo variety isn’t enough and crossing with heatless bell peppers are the only way to achieve a heatless aji amarillo?
Seeds themselves don’t have capsaisin, it’s only happens to come from inside the fruit.
You can only confirm that they are hot if you find heat, although eating placenta might be more reliable way to do it. But you can’t say if it’s heatless even if you don’t find heat. Not 100%.
As far as I know there aren’t truly heatless baccatum so to get truly heatless, annuum would be the bet. However, does it have to be truly heatless? In my experience, if you take placenta off aji amarillo, it doesn’t have much heat at all. Ofcourse aji amarillo isn’t just a one variety (as the name suggests; “yellow chili”), but historically common name used for yellow chilies around Peru. It should be realistic to breed the heat level down as long as the material is diverse, but it might not be as straight forward estimating heat level of individual plants. Still over longer time discarding the very hottest will eventually bring the heat level down.
