Desynaptic mutant in chili pepper

Two desynaptic plants from a true breeding variety of Capsicum annuum var. cerasiformis (2n = 24) were isolated from a colchcine-treated cogeneration. Desynapsis in these two plants was presumed to have occurred by homozygous induction. Despite regular pachytene pairing at diakinesis and metaphase I, univalents occurred at a high frequency. Correspondence with a binomial distribution revealed the distribution of bivalents to be random in one plant and nonrandom in the other. Nonrandomness was found to be due to differences between cells within a population. Cytological evidence showed that sterility was due to disorders in chromosome pairing while genetic data indicated that sterility was associated with the homozygous condition of a single recessive gene. Allelism tests showed that the desynaptic genes in the two plants were allelic.