One Shade Too Dark

--- tale of condensed tannins in faba bean seed coats　

An obvious error was the Earlibird and SSNS-1 seeds, which got mixed up with some other faba bean seeds. This was resolved by renaming them Unknown 1 and Unknown 2 and then using DNA fingerprinting to identify what the seeds were and/or which lines they were closest to. A potential error can also be found in the fact that using different primers and different numbers of polymorphisms might result in a slightly different dendrogram. As well, there were times when a PCR reaction was not properly set up resulting in no DNA amplification in some lines (e.g. Figure 5, lanes 11 and 14 with A04 primer).

          In the future, I would like to do more PCRs with different primers to try and find a genetic marker that can be associated with the presence of condensed tannins.  I would also like to do a seed coat analysis with developing seeds since some of the condensed tannins may have become non-extractable as the seeds mature.