Selectra First Class is an international plant breeding company with a high technology plant breeding unit called Ornamental Bioscience. Selectra is a leading breeder of poinsettias as well as many other types of flowers.

The Ornamental Bioscience unit was formed in a merger with Mendel Biotechnology. Mendel has discovered ways to control flowering in poinsettias and other flowers that make them easier to grow.

The Selectra First class web site has information useful to home gardeners as well as professional growers.

From the Selecta First Class site:

Selecta First Class serves the north American market with excellent genetics of vegetative propagated bedding plants and Poinsettias. It is a Selecta Group entity headquartered in California.

Selecta First Class distributes through brokers and root & sell companies in the U.S. and Canada. We focus on outstanding customer service with the commitment to bring the highest quality plant material to the commercial grower.

The Selecta Group is one of the leading breeding and propagation companies in the business of vegetative propagated ornamental plants worldwide. The Selecta Group is owned and managed by the Klemm family in Stuttgart, Germany.

From the Mendel Biotechnology site:

The time at which plants flower is controlled by a complex web of regulatory factors that integrate information about environmental parameters such as daylength, temperature, photosynthesis and many other factors. These controls have evolved to ensure that plants initiate flower development at a time in the lifecycle that will ensure optimal reproductive success under average conditions in native habitats. In many cases, domesticated plants are not grown under similar conditions to the habitats in which they evolved and the regulatory mechanisms are not well suited to the intended human use. Thus, for example, some types of flowers are exposed to artificially altered daylengths in order to induce them to flower in time for a special date such as Christmas or Easter.

Mendel has identified several key genes that regulate floral induction and is using these genes to develop new ways to control the flowering of economically important plants.