By Luke Costin

Seeing a sea of sunflowers across Australian paddocks could become a more regular sight due to a quirky breeding discovery.

Research published in eminent journal Nature on Thursday revealed researchers have developed a simplified breeding process.

As well as being wildly popular, sunflower is the world’s third-largest oilseed crop and provides edible seeds for humans and domestic birds.

The new method involves chemically emasculating the sunflower crop after researchers found nutrient-rich endosperm that nourishes the embryo of the flower may not be necessary.

The Chinese and American experts behind the research propose the important nutrients may be stored elsewhere in the seed.

The single-parent seeds flowered as usual, but the researchers did not observe them generate any pollen.

It could cut the time it takes to produce viable inbred sunflower crops from about six annual cycles of self-pollination to 10 months, the researchers suggest.

But they caution it could be dependent on certain sunflower genomes.

Further research would be necessary to determine if this strategy of chemically emasculation or induced parthenogenesis could be used in other economically important crops.

“Much remains to be discovered about the range of reproductive modes used by all flowering plants, including well-studied crop species,” the researchers said in the peer-reviewed paper.

“It is surprising that parthenogenesis operates independent of apomixis (a form of asexual reproduction) and that viable seeds form, absent fertilised endosperm in sunflower.

“We hypothesise that in sunflower, parthenogenesis may serve as an escape from male sterility in conditions of environmental stress, a fortuitous accident.”

The study is published in Nature.