flaflwrgrl said:Thank you Maurice. I'm a little confused as to whether this is a sport or a sport with a jumping gene. Or is the yellow flower a sport but the 2 flowers that had the split color are sports with jumping genes? Those are the parts that are a bit tangled up for me.
If in the first photograph the yellow flower is on a scape on different fan from the reddish flower and all the other flowers on the same scape are the same yellow then those flowers and that scape as well as probably that fan are a sport. Seeing only those flowers we would not have any clues as to the type of sport or its possible cause. A sport means a change from what is expected and can be caused in several different ways. Usually a sport happens once and changes a part of the plant permanently.
The second photo shows two flowers that have sections of the other colour, one has smaller sections while the other has a very large section of reddish colour. From this photo we now have more clues to the nature of the sport. In this case the sport did not happen once only, it is continuing to happen in different flowers and in different times/sizes in those flowers. So the sport is unstable. So the sport may be caused by a jumping gene (we cannot be sure without detailed experiments, genetic analyses, DNA sequencing, etc.).
So all yellow parts of the flowers are the sports and the cause of those sports may be a jumping gene.
Another question I have & I may have missed the point in the explanation, is what caused this or these fans to suddenly deviate from being clones of their "mother" Flasher? Or do we know or can guess at possible reasons?
We don't know what caused the initial sport or appearance of yellow colour. There can be different reasons so although the reason may be a jumping gene it may not be and it may be something else (such as somatic crossing over). Even if it is a jumping gene we do not know why it would go from being inactive or not jumping to suddenly jumping.
