Inbreeding.....the Skill of the Breeder.....

[romanoweed]

This is going to be a very subjective Post now:

the only place i see every trait boosted as you say is in nature ,but is not really boosted its as it should be

Yes i absolutely agree harvester


I smoked some industrial weed in the bad times. One time i made Brownies with it. It had a very psychedelic high, funnily the flash came to a point where i couldnt think nomore, only a couple slow thoughts were in my mind. Not Pleasant really, was headychy (i dont agree industrial weed gives headache every time). I mean it rather like: bad traits covering the good ones.


So it would actually fit to inbreed, and get rid of these. And actually rather not create Traits.. no,rather loose the unwanted ..


So i would call it EVEN rather like : the industrial weed was : good at its own when comparing all weeds i consumed it has its high ranking, way higher than average streetweed, let the ranking..It was somehow good and the 70s Tripweed was good. Bouth was good, and they somehow reminded me of each other. Assumed that the industrial weed preserved a bit of wild traits, and showed that broad Spectrum i like so much , the 70s Tripweed was similar in that ragard, had broad Spectrum cared over. I see just similarities.. And cant really tell i liked the 70s Tripweed more, and in the same time i absoulutely liked it more. Its funny.
So, there is a very interesting Effect going on when Humans start to breed (or just choose the one of a million) the 70sLAndraces , wich somehow changes the Strain, but somehow it still reminds me completely of the wildish industrial hemp (assumed hemp contained the initilal traits in the Flash-sector). Shure industrial weed i ate, not somked.. still that mentioning of that experience after "ultrahigh" dosage might be very intformative to get the idea of broad Spectrum.. You can see it when you look at the industrial plants too. (they arent just one strain, but many look broad in spectrum). Can you see, that kind of multicolored rainbow aperance of reflections at the Surface of the Bud, and like a White/Black balance wich is very in balance. That is how some good Breeding-Groundmaterial looks like (or endmaterial).. Tastes are different but i like that White/Black traits (probably the presence of very soft, subtile traits) aswell as the Rainbow traits (probably the presence of soft and Subtile Traits too) ,wich are somehow present in both the industrial hemp and the 70s Landrace . Only that in the 70s Landrace there is a rather subtile difference, wich i cant really call out, its a very chomplex change..

 

[romanoweed]

assumably Wild Strain, since known wild Region: (viet)

"Manmade" Strain (thai)

 

[harryb]

I'm one of the people who's inbred a number of cannabis strains past F7 so I can speak from experience about what happens.

First, the idea that inbreeding inevitably results in inbreeding depression is just not true. Isolating populations can prevent genetic defects as surely as it can create them. If I inbreed a population that is vigorous and healthy, the result is a large percentage of healthy vigorous individuals. Our notion that inbreeding depression is inevitable comes from zea mays or corn, which is the poster child of inbreeding depression. Corn was bred into the corner like 10,000 years ago. But, is corn done for? No. Thanks to good old selective breeding, corn has quadrupled in yield in the last century.

Modern cannabis has tons more variability than corn. It's nowhere near inbred to the point of losing vigor. Sure, there is a lot of needy 'boutique' genetics as my daughter calls them going around. But, any loss of vigor is because breeders are selecting less vigorous plants, probably while focusing on other traits. I inbred Cherry Bomb at least a dozen generations before releasing it in the early 2000's, and anyone can tell you CB is, in addition to being 'stable', extremely vigorous and hard to stress. All it takes is selecting for more traits each generation instead of just focusing on a few. In fact, this is what really separates novice breeders from advanced in my mind. Experienced breeders can make sweeping changes in few generations by observing and selecting for more traits. It's quantitative.

When I was 8-9 years old, I got heavily involved in breeding fancy guppies so I was always at the library reading everything I could find on genetics. I loved my punnet squares! They actually worked fairly well for certain traits on my guppies, but not much help for my grandmothers beans and tomatoes. Fast forward to my late teens and I'm breeding cannabis. I return to my punnet squares for a while, but give it up when I realize that all the traits I'm selecting for are variably expressed. That means even sorting them is subjective. That science was way to soft for my literal rigid young mind, so I gave up on using my precious punnet squares with cannabis.

So, no use for big breeding words and theory....then what? I think it's clear that the goal is to identify plants that have W.Y.S.I.W.Y.G.* to breed with. People use the term stable, but I'm not comfortable with that word unless it's qualified; “This plant is stable for X traits”. If a plant comes from an inbred line, or IBL it should be relatively stable for the traits it was selected for. Using a male from an IBL is one of the best ways to ensure good male selection. It takes the guess work out of the job. If a plant is from a recent hybridization, it will need to be progeny tested to see if it's WYSIWYG. It's the only way to find out. Some hybrids 'throw' some (or more rarely, all) of their desired traits, others don't.

Also, a word on 'unicorns'. A true outlier in a large (100 or more) seed batch needs to be viewed with a bit of skepticism. If absolutely no other plants share certain traits with the unicorn, it should be suspected of being an accidental pollination from something else. A plant can have very extreme traits, but as long as their shared by others, it is probably not accidental pollination. But, it is also unlikely to have WYSIWYG for those extreme traits. It is a sad fact that, highly select hybrid plants often don't breed true for their extremely expressed traits. By progeny testing a group of ladies that can almost run with the unicorn, the one that 'throws' the most desired traits can be found.

Increased or decreased variation can both be achieved through inbreeding. Both can also be achieved through hybridization. One of the most 'stable' (decreased variation) seed batches I ever made was the result of a double outcross. All depends on the individuals used in selections.

TL;DR Progeny testing is your friend. Two steps forward, one step back. Slow and steady wins the race. It's really not years and years to create something. I've bred a strain through 5 generations in a single year, so....
* What You See Is What You Get

Thanks for coming clean on this subject. I am not a breeder, however I studied the topics in the University. Not claiming expertise, just want to go further on the topic of breeding.

From your text I realize you are able to distinguish between self-pollinating (95%+ self-pollination to make clear for who does not kwon) species such as tomato's an soybean and cross-polinating for instance corn and Cannabis (95%+ cross-polination), independently of the way it happens because it varies.

What comes from this is that inbreed self-pollinating species are considered a cultivar (a.k.a strain) since breed properly because they benefit on homozygosity. What does not happen on cross-polinating species, rather they suffer from inbreed depression which at the end translates to lower productivity and of course small and slow growing plants etc. Beeing redundant, is homozygosity in cross-polinating species the cause of inbreeding depression in cross-polinating species.

As the main topic is breeding Cannabis I will not go on the how plants keep productivity on nature. The main reason is because it is already explained along the discussion with animals (works kind of the same as cross-polinating species), further because it's not the focus here, it would be long and I also would not be able to give the full explanation due to my limitations. (Mr. Greengenes, all written is to both support my question and education)

So then come the question to you. Do you agree that the path for breeding F1 hybrid Cannabis is much more like corn breeding than soybean? By this I mean get pure lineages from inbreeding selecting desired traits as they are lost and after 7-8 generations, when the lineages are stable, real stable 99%+ AABBCCDD...
And from this, cross the lineages (as many pure lineages as you can) against each other to get F1 single hybrid lineages that will be now 99%+ AaBbCcDd.... (from where comes the hybrid vigour) to be evaluated on field before became a cultivar (a.k.a strain) for the market.

I also didn't talk about recurrent selection since I have not much knowledge on the topic, even so I believe breeders try to breed this way and sell seed breed this way, however it is not as good as pure F1 in the way it lack genetic potencial from heterosis also because it is hard to keep smell and taste traits homogeneous and constant through time. For instance seeds everyday, most have many phenotypes, if you grow 1 seed of each cultivar at time you may not be able to check it but from 10 seeds is already possible o observe how diverse are the crops from one called strain.

That said, if someone has the will to keep the discussion, please do both in the way I am suggesting Cannabis should be breed and recurrent selection.
For recurrent selection this link https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/BINTA11223344/recurrent-selection-sca1
Will be very helpful.

Now just rambling.
In corn, there are two called heterotic groups named flint and dent, what happens is that when you cross flint lineage X dent lineage you'll have more gain from heterosis. Would be Sativa, Indica and Ruderalis heterotic groups in Cannabis breeding?

Sorry for any English mistakes (mainly prepositions I believe). Best regards from Brazil!

 

[romanoweed]

Inbreedingdepression only a Cause of bad Breeding? No loss of Terpenes like Harry says, if done right? No benefit of selection with ultrahigh Amount of "wanted" Traits, beyound the "sufficient couple of Traits at Beginning" ?

 

[harryb]

Inbreedingdepression only a Cause of bad Breeding? No loss of Terpenes like Harry says, if done right? No benefit of selection with ultrahigh Amount of "wanted" Traits, beyound the "sufficient couple of Traits at Beginning" ?

I Showed Mr. Greengenes text to a friend of mine who works with cattle breeding, and we agreed many traits are very hard to fix. It is common sense that breed for one or few traits are much more observable and makes less data to handle.

I did not mean loss of terpenes, I mean loss of terpene profile, sorry if was misunderstood.

If you are talking about open pollinated varieties, you manage to not lose heterosis for instance out-crossing, thought it is hard to keep the flavor profile this way since flavor is a quantitative characteristic and therefore prone to great segregation throughout time.

 

[harryb]

"Seed-propagated drug cultivars must be rigorously
selected to maintain their potency. Feral drug Cannabis
populations lose potency quickly because open
pollination does not impose selective pressures favoring
high THC content, low CBD content, or favorable aromatic
profiles. The atavistic lowering of potency in naturalized
populations may indicate that THC is not of
great natural adaptive significance. Apparently,
enhanced THC synthesis is primarily an artifact of
human selection, and represents another key aspect of
the ancient human–Cannabis relationship" - Robert C. Clarke & Mark D. Merlin

https://sci-hub.tw/http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07352689.2016.1267498
This is a very good paper on the topic of Cannabis breeding. You all have a nice week!bet

 

[harryb]

Successful breeding of open-pollinated cultivars requires
the identification of plants with favorable traits, and then
creating breeding lines via recurrent selection, making
hybrid crosses between these lines, and field testing their
progeny (Posselt, 2010).

From the same paper