Cultivation of Echinacea has gained worldwide interest in recent years due to its non-specific immunomodulatory activity in humans. However, Echinacea species have not been genetically improved for medicinal use. This project is to develop genetically improved Echinacea cultivars for medicinal use. The new cultivars will produce higher yield of biomass and bioactive phytochemicals than the types currently cultivated. OBJECTIVES: This research project is to develop cultivars for medicinal use in the two most widely used Echinacea species, E. angustifolia and E. purpurea, by intra- and interspecific hybridization. The work of parental plant selection, propagation, hybridization and establishment of field test experiments has been conducted successfully during the Phase I research. The key tasks in Phase II are to conduct progeny and location tests to progress the cultivar development to field production trial stage and vegetatively propagate selected parental plants for commercial scale seed production. APPROACH: The cultivar development will be by conventional plant breeding methods. A two-step phenotypic selection (morphological and chemical) will be used for initial parental-plant identification. Synthetic cultivars will be our primary target for development. For faster development and more efficient resource utilization, an unreplicated open-pollinated polycross design will be used. Improved genotypes will be advanced rapidly to commercial production, but steady genetic improvement will also be emphasized by progeny tests. The selections after progeny tests will be vegetatively propagated to a large amount by conventional and micropropagation methods to increase total stock for seed production
