I don't know very much about it to tell the truth. It's easy enough to purchase separately on line at Amazon. Not terribly expensive ether. If you wanna see where I got the idea from, it was on MagicJim's last journal. It was like 3 foilers a week apart and boom he had a male plant.
It worked for him first try so I figured I may as well try that instead of buying up all the seeds I can find.
I seem to be specially attracted to the seeds with the fanciest labels and biggest brightest flower pics.
In theory, take a clone and reverse that clone and take the pollen from that reversed clone and mate it with another clone of the same plant...
boom seeds should all be female and all be exactly the same (selfing)... I'm thinking that, but is it true?
I know nothing about genetics other than I like seeds and I like cannabis. My wife is always bringing in dead flowers this time of year from the gardens outdoors and collecting seeds and I help her plant them... that's about all I know on the subject.
Seeds turn into plants ... most of the time. Yay!
This is something that I'm struggling with comprehending myself. I think the reason why this creates all female plants has to do with something called homozygous genotypes.
So imagine that cannabis plants aren't really "male" or "female", and are actually just two types of flowering varieties. You have "pistillate" which makes the flowers we like, and "staminant" which are just for pollen. There probably is a gene, not necessarily an X or Y gene like we have, but one that controls whether plants have the pistillate or staminant trait. Let's say that that A = staminant, and a = pistillate, in other words pistillate is the recessive allele and staminant plants are the dominant alelle. Well the way genotypes are expressed, if a plant has the combination Aa in its allele's then the staminant trait will be dominant, and it will produce our "male" flowers. The same would be true if it were AA. However, if it were a combination of just aa, that would produce the "female" pistillate flowers we want.
Okay, so then thinking about this in terms of taking the pollen from a "female" plant that you've reversed to "male" what you have is an aa genotype. So then you cross that aa genotype with another aa genotype ( a clone of the same plant ) and meiosis has no other alleles to choose from except that once recessive trait of pistillate flowers, and now all of the offspring will be aa, i.e. pistillate, i.e. female.
That works to produce all female plants because the gene started out homozygous to begin with, but if you have a heterzygous genotype, then meiosis should split up your distribution of resulting genoetypes in the same way normal sexual propagation between two P1 parents would. So say you have P1 and P2 and they're "male" and "female" plants from the same strain, but that strain is an F1 hybrid, meaning it has differently-combined genotypes, Aa, or Bb, etc. When meiosis splits up those into allele's then, there's different combinations you can make, AA, aa, or Aa, and a certain percentage chance of each one. I'm not sure how different the process of meiosis is when its getting each alelle from the same set of DNA or whether it makes any changes at all, so even with the same exact set of DNA there will be variations. There's 20 chromosomes in cannabis, and each of those has a certain combination of these "genotypes", so while all the homozygous genotypes will be copied as is, the heterozygous ones are still up in the air.
But the more successive generations that you do this process, the more chances meiosis has of producing homozygous pairs that will be copied perfectly in the next fertilization. So the S1 generation may not be very much like its donor parent ( depending on the genes to begin with ) but as you select for traits you like and produce S2, S3, S4 and so on, then each round more and more genotypes get turned homozygous, and from what I've read at about the S8 generation you'll have mostly true-breeding plants that if you self'd will produce exactly copies.
But you gotta think that even if you're not getting an exactly copy, you're going to end up with something a lot closer than if you crossed it with another parent of a total different genetic line. So if the goal is trying to save the genetics of a particular variety, I think it's still a much better choice than crossing it with a parent of totally different genetic makeup, because that just makes it more likely you'll lose the traits you wanted to preserve.
Like crossed against like gets like, but same crossed with same won't get same.
As a side note ( in case you're not already sick of reading my BS ), meiosis is not a perfect process and can break down leaving some chromosomes out, or creating extras. Sometimes that creates good things like polyploids, but also creates eutypoloids (I think don't quote me) that are missing chromosomes which are basically inbred mutants. Same way if humans start inbreeding for two long they get deformities, so eventually you have to cross-out the stabilized line just to reintroduce health and vigor.
