Listing is for 20 very rare and promising high capsinoid pepper plant seeds. Back in 2016 there was some interesting new published research showing a synergistic effect between cold exposure and capsinoids, here is one of the popular press summaries: Cold exposure, capsinoids further beige adipocyte biogenesis (medicalxpress.com/news/2016-03-cold-exposure-capsinoids-beige-adipocyte.html )This led me to wonder how I could get capsinoids? ;)Capsinoids are the “not hot” equivalent of a hot pepper – many of the same health benefits, without the burn! The problem is, very few sweet pepper varieties have high levels of capsinoids. There was one Japanese research group that managed to come up with a high capsinoid pepper variety, but they decided to keep a ridiculously tight lid on it, they have an exclusive partnership with a firm that is the sole grower and extractor of the capsiniods, which are now sold in commercial weight loss supplement type products. I did actually try to track down and reach out to these Japanese researchers, but got no where. Digging deeper, I found a U.S. research team that had also been focused on this area of research, they had begun a traditional selective breeding program in 2005 starting with 120 Capsicum annuum cultivars. I had some pleasant email exchanges with these researchers. They worked on this project for almost 10 years, until they had the highest capsinoid containing sweet pepper variety ever developed (as far as I am aware). They gave this plant the exciting name of germplasm “509-45-1”, haha. See:phys.org/news/2014-03-capsicum-annuum-pepper-high-beneficial.html (New Capsicum annuum pepper contains high concentrations of beneficial capsinoids)But despite my best efforts to butter them up, I still could not get any seeds from these guys. Also there are absolutely no commercial sales for this type of pepper (that I could find anyway, after a lot of searching). But they did their work under a USDA grant, and I already knew they had turned over their resulting seeds to the US germplasm library, surely there were seeds to be had! I went through the usual hoops to request a small sample of seeds from the US germplasm library, but after a couple weeks, received a rejection letter. So I tried harder, reaching out to various academic contacts and other researchers who might have been sympathetic to my cause. No dice, got no where. As a last ditch effort, I reached out to one last contact, who long story short, came through. But at this point it was already late August or September of 2016, way too late to plant them for the 2016 season, right? Eh, nothing was going to stop me, haha. I immediately germinated the seeds and began preparing an indoor grow light setup. I had to hand pollinate the blooms. By end of winter, I had a few peppers and grew more plants outdoors for 2017. Grew even more in 2018 and I finally have an excess of seeds. These plants come back every year if you keep them from freezing. You might think such a rare and difficult to acquire seed, for a plant with such valuable health promoting properties would be worth a lot – but there are probably only a handful of people that even know this exists, and the plant doesn’t even have a proper name, so really how would anyone even find it if they were looking… That said, I figured I’d list them on eBay anyway, to see if anyone else is searching for them like I was. Probably at some future point you will actually have a lot of products on the market that contain these valuable capsinoids, but its going to take many years before that happens. You can read more about capsinoids on wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsinoids ) Anyway, if you stumbled upon this listing, and want to grow peppers with fantastic health benefits that pretty much no one else has, and you cannot purchase anywhere else, then you found the right listing!