Consider the role of chlorophyll.

To manufacture sugars from air and water. These sugars are then used to form new growth with a parallel developement of the roots to obtain the minerals needed in the process.

So in theory if an albino seedling is provided with sugars it should be able to survive until it can be transferred onto a green rootstock that can take over the role. In time it may produce a shoot with some chlorophyll and be able to survive in its own right.

The sugars needed for this are available, maple syrup, and plant food could also be supplied by foliar feeding at sametime as providing needed sugars.

This theory and probably too simplistic but does anyone think its worth trying? Probaly need to add fungicide to foliar feed otherise excess sugars on leaves would cause blackmould anf attract pests.

Totally albino shoots are not uncommon on variegated plants - including citrus. The usual advice is to cut them off because thay always eventually die anyway.
If your theory were correct, such shoots - which are provided with the same sap and nutrition as any other shoot - would survive. They don't.
I think your grafted albino seeedlings will die, or possibly revert to all green. No different from the behaviour of the seedling without grafting.
But please carry out the experiment and prove me wrong!

The way I see it is there is nothing to lose.

Laaz may be sending me seed from his variegated flying dragon, he says 'it produces 100percent albinos that invariably die".

Where other albino seedlings arise some go onto produce a full quota of chlorophyll before they exhaust the engergy stored in the cotyledons. They end up as normal green plants.

So there are 2extremes with no variegated plants inbetween.
This doesn"t seem to add up.

Perhaps if the seedlings can survive a little longer some of them may be intermediate - that is variegated.

Yes you are probably right even if the experiment is successful a significant number will never develope chlorophyll and die, another cohort will become completely green but there may just be one or two that end up variegated.

I've read scientific literature on several occasions that using mercury on the seed has kept the seedling from germinating as an albino (not 100% Successful). There was also another chemical that is used as a seed soak, but for the life of me I can't remember what it was. - Millet 3042

Thanks Millet.

Murcuric salts seem really drastic and would be unobtainable for ordinary people.

Thinking about it it would be useful to add a tiny amount of proprionic acid to the mix. If I remember my biology lessons, krebs cycle most plants are c3 producers except for grasses and a few others that produce a 4carbon acid as basis for manufacturing more complex molecules.

Variegated plants have distinct patterns of presence/absence of chlorophyll.
Albino seedlings have zero chlorophyll, this doesn't mean they are 100% variegated white, so to speak. The mechanism of these 2 conditions is not necessarily the same.
A partial albino seedling is also green+white, but the patterning is different.
If your method works, aren't these what you will recover ??

I agree with Pagnr that there are probably different causes af albino seedlings.
The treatments that Millet and others have talked about, are fungicides that appear to prevent albinism in seedlings. These are seedlings which ideally would not be expected to show albinism - such as a batch of commercial rootstock seedlings - but do often have a small percentage with the trait.
However (as I have mentioned before somewhere on this forum) I guess that such treatment would have no effect on seeds collected from a variegated plant. These seeds must already contain a gene for albinism, rather than be genetically damaged in some way by a fungus.
Mike/Citrange

Disagree!

Seeds from a variegated cross may well be able to produce variegated seedling. They do, albeit rarely, in other plants.

There may just be something in the citrus genome which gives a greater tendancy to a loe level of chlorophyll at grrmination. Variegation exacerbates this and seedling do not get chance to increase chlorophyll levels before they starve.

All the experiment is trying to do is give extra sugars as energy to test hypothesis.

If being realistic will probably fail but what is lost by trying?

As a follow up toCitrange and my above posts I looked up an old literature that I remembered reading about albinism. The chemical for the "control" of albinism that I could not remember in my above post, as Citrange stated, was indeed a fungicide. Albinism is probably most commonly caused by the fungus Alternaria tenuis. This fungus has consistently been isolated from seed lots with a high percentage of albino seedlings, and symptoms have been reproduced by inoculation of seed with Allbinish tenis. The article stated that albinism can be prevented by proper storage of seed and treatment with thiram or 8-hydroxquinoline sulfate (8-HQS). I purchase 8-HOC (8-hydroxyquinoline citrate in 100-lb. drums. I'll have to try 8-HQC to see if it has any control properties. - Millet