Cross pollinators: F1 hybrids, contd
- Heterosis is maximized when the parents of the hybrid are both inbreds. But in some species it can be difficult to enforce inbreeding because of either dichogamy or self-incompatibility, and most suffer from inbreeding depression
- In maize, a lot of selection effort has gone into breeding inbred lines which are good combiners and do not suffer too much from inbreeding depression
- In maize, emasculation is achieved either by mechanical de-tasseling, or by genetic male sterility