Heterosis goes underground

Heterosis has been widely exploited in plant breeding since the beginning of the 20th century to obtain highyielding cultivars. Dafna et al. (2021) studied the yield variation in a melon variety grafted onto a collection of hybrid rootstocks, demonstrating that yield heterosis can also be induced from the rootstock to the scion. The authors propose a new approach to exploit root potentialities instead of focusing on root architecture to investigate root-mediated plant performance. This approach is especially interesting in crops, such as melon, where the crosses between genetically highly divergent inbreds produce hybrids that do not maintain the quality parameters expected by growers and consumers.