Breeding For Seeds: Hybrid Vigour Vs Stabilizing The Strain

Ok, lets liven this thread up with a bit of controversy!! :cool:

Breeding for Seeds, lets talk about seeds.

With the huge popularity of feminised seed and closet growers all over the world using Colloidal silver and STS to reverse sex on their females to produce pollen my question is, How safe is it?

Humans consider themselves quite intelligent but sometimes I wonder. The release of GM crops into the environment without adequate testing is a huge risk in my opinion considering independent tests have shown huge increases in rates of cancer and other mutations in livestock fed with GMO crops.

Today, consumers eat these foods daily without knowing the potential health risks. In 2003, Jeffrey Smith explained them in his book titled "Seeds of Deception." He revealed that efforts to inform the public have been quashed, reliable science has been buried, and consider what happened to two distinguished scientists — UC Berkeley's Ignacio Chapela and former Scotland Rowett Research Institute researcher and world's leading lectins and plant genetic modification expert, Arpad Pusztai. They were vilified, hounded, and threatened for their research, and in the case of Pusztai, fired from his job for doing it.
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Yes, it's all hush hush, they don't want you to know.

Now you are probably thinking why the hell is he going on about GMO crops??

By reversing your plants to get feminised pollen, then using that pollen to create female seed is actually a form of GMO.

Using chemicals to affect genes in plants is what Genetic Engineers refer to it as "TILLING",

TILLING stands for Targeted Induced Local Lesions In The Genome and produces Oligonucleotide mediated site-specific mutagenesis.

Objective - Enhancing genetic variation

Activity - Random and targeted mutagenesis
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That's right, if you are smoking feminised weed you are smoking a GMO crop.

** Should science make a link to disease/fatality in humans from use of feminised seed, the seed vendors are exposed to huge lawsuits and financial Armageddon :rofl:

Now my concern is not for human health as we are all going to die anyway, but rather what effects breeding with this seed will have on the cannabis genome.

Now we all know what a punnet square is, they are universally accepted in predicting the genetic outcome of crosses in breeding.

Lets take a look at a standard cross between a male and female, x being female and y being male.

xyxy.jpg


standard outcome of 50% male, and 50% female.

Now lets look at a cross between feminised pollen and a standard female

xy.jpg


Result is all female plants, but two of those x genes are in fact the Y gene which has been forced to change to X by chemical mutation.

Now breeders are reversing Males as well.

Fertile female flowers can be induced in male plants by ethephon (2-chloroethanephosphonic acid) and NIA 10637 (ethylhydrogen-l-propylphosphonate).
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Lets take a look at that cross using a reversed male pollinated with standard male pollen,

yy.jpg


there you go, a new gene YY

Do we really need to be making frankenstien weed simply because we are too lazy to sort our plants for males????
 
Hybrid Garden

Just because the stuff makes the female plant produce a male flower doesn't mean the seed it produces has been altered does it?

Does a chromosome that is missing make the seed altered if all it produces is what it may normally produce anyway?

And does a stressed plant that produces female pollen alter any genes?

I am not disputing your previous post, just curious.
 
Hash Hound said:
I am not disputing your previous post, just curious.
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Asking a valid question is not a dispute. :cheesygrinsmiley: The reason for my post was to encourage discussion. Thanks for responding.

Hash Hound said:
Just because the stuff makes the female plant produce a male flower doesn't mean the seed it produces has been altered does it?
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Well the staminate plant (male) contains 2 chromosomes for sexual expression X and Y. By chemically mutating the Y chromosome to transform it to X is something that doesn't occur in nature, therefore is man made and will be passed on to the next generation. As reproduction requires one chromosome from each parent, 50% of the offspring will contain a mutated gene.

Hash Hound said:
Does a chromosome that is missing make the seed altered if all it produces is what it may normally produce anyway?
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Plants with a missing chromosome are called Haploids and are sterile. The chromosome is not missing. If it was the pollen would be sterile. For arguments sake we could assume that the chemical sterilizes the Y gene, leaving only the X chromosome to reproduce, but as they can get a male to produce male seed it appears this is not the case.

Hash Hound said:
And does a stressed plant that produces female pollen alter any genes?
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Genotype + Environment = Phenotype.

Any plant that Hermies under stress is genetically encoded to Hermie, and only when the plant is stressed will it exhibit that trait in the visible phenotype.

For example, a plant that is genetically encoded for drought resistance will never visibly show that trait whilst it is getting adequate water. When you cut off the water supply, the plants which aren't coded for drought resistance will die, whilst the ones that are will survive. This comes under the umbrella of Epigenetics.

Epigenetics is the study, in the field of genetics, of cellular and physiological phenotypic trait variations that are caused by external or environmental factors that switch genes on and off and affect how cells read genes instead of being caused by changes in the DNA sequence.
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Now take a Thai that hermies naturally. A hermie is a hermie is a hermie. Genetically encoded for it and it will express that phenotype irrespective of the environment.

Now take a female plant, that has been flowered and prevented from being pollinated by a male, as we do in the grow room. These plants may spit banana's towards the end of their life cycle. This is not hermie, but a genetic code to ensure survival of the species. The plant will produce only female seed, but nature likes birds to eat seeds and move them around. Hopefully it will deposited near a population of cannabis that contains male plants.

Ever wonder why your plants don't hermie if there is a male in the room? The females know it's there, don't ask me how but they know.
 
Hugs HybridGarden,

Well the staminate plant (male) contains 2 chromosomes for sexual expression X and Y. By chemically mutating the Y chromosome to transform it to X is something that doesn't occur in nature, therefore is man made and will be passed on to the next generation. As reproduction requires one chromosome from each parent, 50% of the offspring will contain a mutated gene.
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First of all, thank you for continuing to educate us in cannabis genetics.

I do have a question about your statement above. Are you sure that Y chromosomes are being mutated into X through the use of a silver based solution? It was my understanding that these sprays switched off Y expression thus building a predominance of X.

Cannabis can have dioecious (separate male and female plants), monoecious (hermaphroditic) genes or a combination of dio and mono genes.

Silver based sprays and also ethylene treatment of seeds are hedging on encouraging or discouraging monoecious genetics to X or Y expression depending on the desired result.

I'm not sure true dioecious plants are affected by these treatments.

Ever wonder why your plants don't hermie if there is a male in the room? The females know it's there, don't ask me how but they know.
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The following is a picture of one of my female hemp reaching the end of it's life cycle:
hempjournal8.png

Notice the red arrows pointing to sticky resin substance oozing near flowers which have not been pollinated. Hemp can produce sticky trichomes and/or sticky resin in sinsemilla(not pollinated) form. This plant knows there is or at least was a male cannabis present at one time. The early flowers were pollinated 4 weeks before the later flowers appeared. I deduce that the later flowers are madly producing terpene resin to attract and trap insects that may have cannabis pollen on their bodies. This type of hemp is bred for food and seed oil.

I think this variety of hemp is mostly monoecious with a high percentage of females over hermaphrodites.
 
Having been an active weed breeder since the late 70's I'd like to wade in here for a second. The biggest problem with simply looking at the nuts and bolts of plant breeding is that it soon becomes apparent that the human factor in the program is one of the biggest challenges.
First it becomes extremely hard to maintain focus as a breeder. It is easy to get side tracked because of plant variations that you inevitably run across. Ultimately few of these really pan out and it becomes wasted time. Good smoke.... but not advancing your goals as a breeder.
Secondly it is almost impossible in the current legal situation to have plant populations that are high enough for a breeder to examine and choose enough similar breeding specimens. If you want to see the road ahead to true line-stable hybrid weed I encourage you to read some of the stories of the development of hybrid corn by Eugene Funk. Truly hybrid weed of measurable consistent potency would be in high demand in the edibles and concentrate business.
Regardless of the work it's been a great hobby of mine for the last 30 years! Best of luck in all you grow
 
Very good thread, we need more like this here :thumb: My 5 cents, if you have 10 females and 10 males to choose from you're far from breeding, you're just making seeds, that's it. Real breeding involves growing at least 250 plants of one strain just to look for the possible phenos. But for sure it's fun even if you do it on a small scale :tokin:
 
conradino23 said:
Very good thread, we need more like this here :thumb: My 5 cents, if you have 10 females and 10 males to choose from you're far from breeding, you're just making seeds, that's it. Real breeding involves growing at least 250 plants of one strain just to look for the possible phenos. But for sure it's fun even if you do it on a small scale :tokin:
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True breeders normally runs 1000s of plants looking for traits but I was thinking that Hybrid Vigour could come a good second if the chosen parents are decent. It is just a trial to see if a lot of us could get good plants from simple seeding.

Breeders have many criteria to fill but growers only usually look for a few criteria to fulfill their needs.
 
If you cross a landrace sativa with landrace indica, and all legendary strains were done that way, for example Skunk #1, a long staple of Cali genetics, and still very popular in Europe, was a three way cross between Colombian Gold x Acapulco Gold x Afghan Kush, then you're gonna get F1 generation which will always express bigger vigour than their parents unless you chose very bad phenos :cheesygrinsmiley: But many great strains were created by accident, like Sour Diesel or Green Crack, so even on a small scale creating a great strain is possible, but you just have to be lucky :smokin2:
 
conradino23 said:
If you cross a landrace sativa with landrace indica, and all legendary strains were done that way, for example Skunk #1, a long staple of Cali genetics, and still very popular in Europe, was a three way cross between Colombian Gold x Acapulco Gold x Afghan Kush, then you're gonna get F1 generation which will always express bigger vigour than their parents unless you chose very bad phenos :cheesygrinsmiley: But many great strains were created by accident, like Sour Diesel or Green Crack, so even on a small scale creating a great strain is possible, but you just have to be lucky :smokin2:
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Well here's hoping my friend.
 
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