In 1972 (MNL 46:20), we reported that Cuzco flour corn apparently carried perennialism factors that could be substituted for pe to produce a perennial phenotype in maize. Subsequent attempts have failed to reproduce this result. A check back through old records shows that the gt/gt stock used in that experiment could have also carried pe/pe, and we presume that this was the case. This leaves the status of my work on perennialism in Zea as found in the two papers, Genetics 50:393-406, and Heredity 58:270-273. In that work, it was found that perennial diploids in Zea are based upon a triply recessive genotype: pe/pe, isolated from "clone A", id/id, and gt/gt, the latter two being classical maize mutants. While the status of pe has always been weak, the failure to find factors in Cuzco which replace it is in some degree supportive of the goodness of pe's status, since it remains true that diploid perennials are not obtained without its use or incorporation.

D. L. Shaver
 
 

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