Here is my take on the ways people use the term "OP".
http://garden.org/ideas/view/R...
1.
When a commercial seed catalog calls a variety "OP", they mean that it was inbred over enough generations, with careful selection and rouging out undesirable plants to make the important traits breed true (homozygous). You can collect seeds from them and expect those seeds to come true - as long as you did not let them cross-pollinate with a different variety of the same species.
2.
When a seed trader marks a packet "OP", that might mean the same as the above definition of an OP variety, or it might mean something totally different:
openly pollinated. "Openly pollinated" means that they were freely pollinated "by nature" instead of by human intervention. (She did NOT bag the blooms and pollinate them manually.) It means they were pollinated by the wind and insects, not by human intervention.
- They might have observed isolation distances.
- They might have inter-planted other varieties (promiscuous cross-pollination).
- They might have let an F1 hybrid go to seed with or without cross-pollination
Let me get back to you with some lengthy ramblings about GE techniques. Basically, directly manipulating genomes in labs with r4cently-developed techniques, not just hybridizing and selecting in fields.
