Hi Thule. How are you?
I would like to ask if someone knows if it is possible to find BT allele inside a modern industrial hemp population, even if it suposedly is chemotype III.
In other words I would like to know if there is occurrency at least of a very few plants belonging to the chemotype II inside a modern industrial hemp strain with THC legal level 0.2-0.3%.
I know the case of an imprisoned Spanish farmer because in the routine analytics, some plants in his crop surpass the upper legal limits.
I have read that happened because all the certified seeds were sold out, and he decided to grow seeds from his previous crop.
Greetings.
I have read it is well stablisehd that some male pollen arrives from Morocco here.The three chemotypes (I, prevalent THC; II, THC and CBD; and III, prevalent CBD) were found in several ecotypes and varieties, though some of the most inbred materials, such as the French monoecious cultivars, only showed two chemotypes (Fournier and Paris, 1980).
https://csatc.org/pdf-Scientific-Research/MandolinoCarboni2004.pdf
The presence of allele BT in the C. sativa gene pool suggests that introgression from C. indica might have played a role in the evolution of C. sativa. Wind-blown pollen may have contributed to allele migration between the two gene pools (Cabezudo et al., 1997⇓). Relatively high BT frequencies (range 0.38–0.55) were detected in seven hemp accessions from Turkey, Spain, Italy, former Yugoslavia, and southern Russia, which are assignable to the southern eco-geographical group of C. sativa (Davidyan, 1972⇓). Additional allozyme markers and morphological traits typical of C. indica were also observed in the southern group of C. sativa (Hillig, 2004⇓, in press).
Human selection of plants carrying two copies of the BT allele appears only to be of appreciable significance in the domestication of the NLD biotype. Human selection may have resulted in an increase in the quantitative levels of cannabinoids produced by the WLD biotype, but the average amount of CBD + THC produced by the NLD biotype did not significantly differ from the hemp and feral biotypes of C. indica. In fact, the average amount of THC + CBD produced by the NLD accessions was not significantly greater than the average amount of these two cannabinoids produced by the hemp accessions of C. sativa. Small and Beckstead (1973b)⇓
However, in some fiber ecotypes, like the one for which chemotypes distribution is shown in Figure 3 (an old Italian fiber ecotype, Eletta Campana), the number of plants that should be considered homozygous for THC was indeed not negligible; besides, the ab- solute amount of THC in the inflorescences, though not at the levels of the drug strains, is high enough to make this cultivar ineligible for EU subsidies. At the beginning of the 1990s, this situation was common for many dioecious fiber cultivars, and therefore the necessity arose, for an effective presence on the mar- ket, to “clean” the seed batches from THC-producing plants, without altering the overall genetic background.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure...the-old-Italian-fiber-cultivar-Eletta-Campana