Well I think that's really the big question. TS posted this from Dutch Passion
If you give me some time I can go find some white papers that mention dioceious varieties being found with higher percentage of females in the wild, but the funny thing is we're more used to seeing more males in our indoor grows.
What it seems to me is that cannabis has genetic sex and physiological sex. So for example in the case of a plant slated for making feminized seeds, we know it has an "xx" genotype and that pollinating another "xx" genotype if it will result in all "female" plants, but what we're really saying is that they will be all "pistillate" plants. Because the plant you're reversing to male is always a genetic female (xx chromosome), but due to some environmental influence ( light schedule, nutrient level, silver application ) the genetically female plant produces staminant or "male" flowers. It becomes genetically female, but physically male.
A more clear way to think of this I believe is to stop thinking about plants as male or female based on whether they bare pistillate or staminant flowers. I really like what Radogast had to say about this and I'm going to look more into the terminology he has used, but I do think that when discussing cannabis that saying a plant with pistillate flowers ( i.e. the kind we like to smoke ) is "female" may be a misnomer, because genetically speaking it could be whatever kind of genetic code unless we test it via laboratory.
Which brings me to what islandgrow was talking about, because with labs like phylos they can test DNA for specific "male" or "female" markers, but are they telling us that a plant is "male" or that it has a gene to produce staminant flowers? In this instance, the terms "male" and "hermaphordite" are less important than the fact that there's a gene marker which shows it will produce staminant flowers--in other words it will throw pollen.
Maybe we can shoot an email over to phylos and see what they think about this? If anyone is up on the genetic science of cannabis it's them. But my opinion is that while genetic sex of cannabis may be determined by DNA, physiological sex (as we define by staminant or pistillate flowers) is subject to change.
I think that's a really good point, and it would stand to reason too if plants were using this as a "survival mechanism" like we think, that they would have had to rely on it more often and more times than the types of cultivated hybrids we tend to cross them out with trying to add in those new traits. We may be unwittingly adding in a tendency toward this survial-mechanism by incorporating those genetics.
However, that would point to it being an inheritable trait, which brings back into question if there's a genetic "code" for that to happen. Like maybe all cannabis
has this survival mechanism, but some varieties have programmed their code to resort to it more readily than others. I think some real strong anecdotal evidence for this would be when people take a strain that's known to go intersex, and then use a "stable" strain that hardly ever does to make a more "stable" cross.
It all points to the "tendency" to go intersex being an inheritable trait in some some variety's genes, but the "ability" to go intersex being inherent in the overall genome of cannabis itself. In that sense, then it would be good for growers practically speaking, because we don't really need to root out the ability for it to go intersex, but just the tendency for it.
This all makes me think of something I didn't know about covered by a cannabis gene lecture that I just love to post around.
YouTube
He talks about a lot of different stuff in this video so if it seems like I'm trying to tell you information you already know, please do give it a watch, it's fascinating. I think the bit that's pertinent to this conversation begins at about 6 minutes to 12 minutes. So he's talking about mutiations effecting biopathways where enzymes like THCA synthase and CBDA synthase are unable to function as effeciently, and this producing strains that produce high levels of THC if their synthase gene is working, and not if it's damaged, so on and so forth right?
Well, if the physical sex is determined genetically, we still do not know exactly what these genetics are programming the plant to do in order to manifest that sex physically. Harking back on the STS, CS points of applying silver, I wonder if anyone knows the specific function this has on a plant that makes it produce staminant flowers? I've only heard through hearsay that the silver blocks the binding of ethylene, and so the plant cannot produce pistillate flowers like it normally would, and thus produces staminant instead. Now, is this because the plant "knows" or has some kind of cognizant recognition of what's happening and can produce those as a backup plan,
or is the silver blocking an enzyme that would normally interact with ethylene, and in the absence of this interaction staminant flowers are produced instead of pistillate. I've played around with it myself, and it does seem like the amount of staminant flowers that occur due to the treatment is somehow effected by the amount of silver applied; low doses seems to cause a high ratio of pistillate to staminant flowers ( so buds with nanners ), but high doses seems to cause a high ratio of staminant to pistillate (pollen sac clusters with a few pistills poking out here and there). It does seem like the foreign element of silver effects the biochemistry in a scalable way, and suggests maybe there is some kind of "ethylene synthase" enzyme that's effected by the silver and without the ethylene, the plant would just produce staminant instead of pistillate flowers, and with the amount of pistillate flowers produced being proportionate to the amount of ethylene available.
SO wild conjecture I know, absolutely no way I'd ever be able to prove such speculation, but I don't think the specifics are as important... Who knows if it's ethylene blocked, but what I'm saying is that perhaps there is a biochemical reaction that reads the DNA blueprints and
that is what determines the physical manifestation of the plant's sex, but because of mutations or other breakdowns the plant is unable to produce this special "pistillate producing" element, and reverts to a default staminant form without it.
