WTF is w/feminized genetics,

[darwinsbulldog]

Tom there is no research real scientific research on female cannabis seeds been done by any one at all and all we have is a few that are producing fem seeds claiming there the best thing since sliced bread there is no evidence to say that this will not be a positive thing for the species or is there evidence to say this method don't produce hermaphrodites and male in fact there is more evidence to show they do from people that grew the fem seeds out now to produce female seeds you need a true female plant which apparently is not an easy thing to find and sam has sed he has only 1.

Your a smart guy tom nature does not do something like add a male into an species for no veiled reason.


So its a valuable tool for breeding you say well i say its a valuable tool for people with no breeding understanding or interest in real breeding and all there interested in is to produce seeds with little effort for market.

I don't think its being unreasonable in a debate to ask for real credible proof like scientific research to back the other party's claims mate after all its only going to serve the debate and the claims by the other side that female seeds are all there sed to be right.


Yes this post has been edited a few times because some in here love to loos it when people post with a different vue or opinion tough some need to grow up.

So were is any credible research to prove female seeds are a positive thing.

hempy you can't keep asking all of us for absolute proof when you yourself don't bring any to the table. i'm an avid atheist, and always cop the "prove god doesn't exist" challenge all the time... when it's them who need to prove that he does exist not me disprove it.

when you're on the side going against the mainstream, what's accepted to be true or is used all the time etc, then it is you who has the burden of proof on yourself and need to find the evidence to disprove others. guys on here have attested to using this technique and not having issues... they've shown you the methodology and technique on paper (where it's clear there shouldn't be any real issues with hermies etc). so i don't know why you keep ignoring this logic and good sense?

so far it seems you only have anecdotes from a few friends, i don't know who they are they may be some of the best breeders in the world, they may not be, but when some of the best breeders in the world are on this thread telling you their own anecdotes and understanding of this topic and you keep ignoring them... it seems you're not really open to whatever proof or evidence we have. just because no research has been done in this area doesn't mean you're right and they're wrong automatically. you just need to open your mind a bit, forget what you've been told by your friends for a minute and come at all this information objectively, look at it all and then try and form a sensible and logical opinion on the topic.

there is no reason that cross-pollination or self-pollination would cause anymore more hermaphrodites to arise than pollination between male and female plants. in fact it may be an easier way of creating 100% female genotypes, therefore reducing hermaphroditism, which would be harder if you're mating with males all the time.

on paper cross-pollination female/female (2 diff fems), compared to male/female breeding will result in as equally healthy offspring as each other. you have 2 parents in both crosses, each of which are contributing 50% of their genome, shuffled up through recombination and made into F1 offspring. the only difference is the ratio of male sex chromosomes passed on, where a male plant has been used, 50% of the offspring will be male, where no male was used, all resulting offspring will be female BUT may have some of the male genes in recessive form (not shown in the phenotype unless under stress/chemicals used to express it).

so many people use this technique (self- and cross-pollination) today, not just breeders out for a quick dollar, if it had so many negative aspects attached to it don't you think these breeders would've worked that out already and have ditched the process? they haven't though, so have a little faith in your peers my friend

darwin

 

[darwinsbulldog]

Can't tell you guys how much I appreciate threads like these! I've gone through this thread a couple times and I'm about to go for a third. Thanks to ALL who have contributed! Even those who IMHO have been proven wrong. To be honest, before starting this thread I was of the (completely uneducated) opinion that "female" seeds were a bad. I now believe they're not and can be a valuable tool in the breeders tool box. This thread also makes me wish I stayed in school a little while longer, cause there are some really smart mofos around here!

couldn't have said it better, i too was under the impression that they were bad, and i'm glad i got on here and read/spoke with people like tomhill, thanks again mate for opening my eyes! you've done us all a tremendous favour by hanging around as long as you have! and yeah even those who were proven wrong in the end, were asking the questions that we all have asked at some point and get us to think about things more and increase our understanding! cheers all!

D

 

[Kangativa]

"so many people use this technique (self- and cross-pollination) today, not just breeders out for a quick dollar, if it had so many negative aspects attached to it don't you think these breeders would've worked that out already and have ditched the process? they haven't though, so have a little faith in your peers my friend"



No mate they wouldnt have worked it out yet.....I was heavily involved in the Quarter horse industry and now the USA has backed themselves into a corner with it will be right just keep breeding with this and that, now they are here looking to find more out crosses because we havent the diseases that have been inbred, and to find all this out this took 200yrs, because the truth is they had not been doing it long enough to see what problems could arise.
Look I see both sides of the story here and appreciate the input from everybody, because it makes a interesting read and a enjoyable battle, but my comment is be carefull, nature has a good way of coming back and biting you on the arse if you stuff with it and it doesnt matter how you produce those female seeds you are stuffing with it and although you cant see it now, you could be altering the plants genetic make up a fraction at a time everytime you produce the seed and I did say COULD BE !!
Cheers....K

 

[resin_lung]

couldn't have said it better, i too was under the impression that they were bad, and i'm glad i got on here and read/spoke with people like tomhill, thanks again mate for opening my eyes! you've done us all a tremendous favour by hanging around as long as you have! and yeah even those who were proven wrong in the end, were asking the questions that we all have asked at some point and get us to think about things more and increase our understanding! cheers all!

D

I agree, Tom's been a real sport. Especially considering all he's got going on. Both his understanding of the science and real world experience is much appreciated!

You've been a great help too darwin! Your input has been great. It's content and the manner in which you've presented it, is something this site could use more of. Thx.

Thats it for the love letters. hahaha

 

[darwinsbulldog]

hey kangativa, i agree with you mate. when inbreeding anything there's an increased chasce of problems cropping up it just comes down to how you do it, what you're selecting for etc. but when it comes to F/F with 2 individuals of the same relatedness as a M/F cross, there should be no difference in viability/genetic health of the offspring. the only difference is that you've forced one of the females to produce male flowers to pollinate the other female. you're not stuffing with the genetics, you're simply creating an environment where those genes can be expressed, if the plant wasn't able to do it it wouldn't full stop.

i do agree that mutations and diseases can be issues with it comes to F/F selfing, though this is rare and if done properly like in any other form of inbreeding, it should be fine. it all comes down to the diligence of the breeder.

thanks for the kind words resin_lung, means a lot

 

[Dalaihempy]

Proof that i did research real research on chemically changed female plants turning them to males then pollinating a female clone of its self no i have not as i believe in nature has a reason for evolution and for species to evolve as they have.

I have spoken to some one that has and i know there out come i have read many growers posts that grew the fem seeds and little if any positives to report yet were is the proof from the pro female seeds side real research or science to back there vues ? There is nothing to show me or any one in this post or any person that turning a female cannabis plant using chemicals to then pollinate an identical genetic female of its self has any real positives other than producing seeds from people that seek money for little effort that also feel breeding is well to much effort .

I have seen no research real scientific research on cannabis fem seeds full stop i have read lots scientific research that tells me the positives that sexual reproductions has over asexual reproduction.

Self-Incompatibility: Avoiding Inbreeding

# Evolution seems to favor (and be favored by) genetic variability.
# Genetic variability is promoted by outbreeding: sexual reproduction between genetically dissimilar parents.
# (Just why sexual reproduction is so popular throughout the world of living things is still a hotly-debated question, but the fact remains.


Why Choose Asexual Reproduction?

Perhaps the better question is: Why not?

After all, asexual reproduction would seem a more efficient way to reproduce. Sexual reproduction requires males but they themselves do not produce offspring.
Two general explanations for the overwhelming prevalence of sexually-reproducing species over asexual ones are:

* Perhaps sexual reproduction has kept in style because it provides a mechanism to weed out (through the recombination process of meiosis) harmful mutations that arise in the population reducing its fitness. Asexual reproduction leads to these mutations becoming homozygous and thus fully exposed to the pressures of natural selection.
* Perhaps it is the ability to adapt quickly to a changing environment that has caused sex to remain the method of choice for most living things.

Purging Harmful Mutations

Most mutations are harmful — changing a functional allele to a less or nonfunctional one.

An asexual population tends to be genetically static. Mutant alleles appear but remain forever associated with the particular alleles present in the rest of that genome. Even a beneficial mutation will be doomed to extinction if trapped along with genes that reduce the fitness of that population.

But with the genetic recombination provided by sex, new alleles can be shuffled into different combinations with all the other alleles available to the genome of that species. A beneficial mutation that first appears alongside harmful alleles can, with recombination, soon find itself in more fit genomes that will enable it to spread through a sexual population.

Rapid Adaptation to a Changing Environment


Evolution of Sexual Reproduction

Advantages of sex: slower rate of reproduction but faster evolution, lower extinction rates, fast removal of deleterious mutations and better adaptation to host-parasite arms race.


Asexual reproduction: generates genetically identical progeny, conservation of harmful mutations (but also favorable genotypes), new genotypes are generated only through mutation.




Advantages of sexual reproduction.Despite the obvious efficiencies of many forms of asexual reproduction, sexual reproduction abounds. Asexual species, for the most part, are relatively short-lived offshoots of sexual ancestors. From the nineteenth century, it has been recognized that, since there is no obvious advantage to the individuals involved, the advantages of sexual reproduction must be evolutionary. Furthermore, the advantage must be substantial; for example, producing males entails a two-fold cost, compared to dispensing with them and reproducing by parthenogenetic females. There are a large number of plausible hypotheses. To me the most convincing of these are two. The first hypothesis, and the oldest, is that sexual reproduction offers the opportunity to produce recombinant types that can make the population better able to keep up with changes in the environment. Although the subject of a great deal of work, and despite its great plausibility, the hypothesis has been very difficult to test by critical observations or experiments. Second, species with recombination can bunch harmful mutations together and eliminate several in a single "genetic death." Asexual species, can eliminate them only in the same genotype in which they occurred. If the rate of occurrence of deleterious mutations is one or more per zygote, some mechanism for eliminating them efficiently must exist. A test of this mutation load hypothesis for sexual reproduction, then, is to find whether deleterious mutation rates in general are this high--as Drosophila data argue. Unfortunately, although molecular and evolutionary studies can give information on the total mutation rate, they cannot determine what fraction are deleterious. In addition, there are short discussions of the advantages of diploidy, anisogamy, and separate sexes.

The evolutionary role of recombinational repair and sex.

We have argued that sexual reproduction arose very early in the evolution of life as a way of overcoming informational damage or loss through recombinational repair. As organisms became more complex and genome information content expanded, diploidy, at first transient, became the predominant way of coping with increased vulnerability to mutation. This allowed further genome expansion. Once such expansion had occurred, however, diploidy became essentially irreversible, since reversion to haploidy would lead to expression of accumulated deleterious recessive alleles. This expression of recessive alleles also imposes a stiff penalty on organisms that experiment with close inbreeding forms of recombinational repair. A consequence of sex is that fitness (defined as per capita rate of increase) is density dependent. At low population density, fitness declines due to increased costs of finding a mate. This fundamental constraint on population increase can inhibit evolutionary success of the best adapted species if it is small in numbers. Sexual reproduction also tends to eliminate new coadapted genotypes within a species by breaking up their coadapted gene complexes; this also contributes to the cohesion of species. In general, we think the existence of species and their characteristic cohesion and stability over time are direct consequences of sex; and sex in turn is a consequence of the need to overcome gene damage through recombinational repair while at the same time masking the deleterious effects of mutation.


Sexual selection and the maintenance of sexual reproduction.

The maintenance of sexual reproduction is a problem in evolutionary theory because, all else being equal, asexual populations have a twofold fitness advantage over their sexual counterparts and should rapidly outnumber a sexual population because every individual has the potential to reproduce. The twofold cost of sex exists because of anisogamy or gamete dimorphism-egg-producing females make a larger contribution to the zygote compared with the small contribution made by the sperm of males, but both males and females contribute 50% of the genes. Anisogamy also generates the conditions for sexual selection, a powerful evolutionary force that does not exist in asexual populations. The continued prevalence of sexual reproduction indicates that the 'all else being equal' assumption is incorrect. Here I show that sexual selection can mitigate or even eliminate the cost of sex. If sexual selection causes deleterious mutations to be more deleterious in males than females, then deleterious mutations are maintained at lower equilibrium frequency in sexual populations relative to asexual populations. The fitness of sexual females is higher than asexuals because there is no difference in the fecundity of sexual females and asexuals of the same genotype, but the equilibrium frequency of deleterious mutations is lower in sexual populations. The results are not altered by synergistic epistasis in males.

Reality is female seeds are now every were and your telling me there a positive thing for the cannabis species well show me why they are but don't tell me there a valuable breeding tool alone that is not a positive thing for the cannabis species that is only a positive for people wanting to cash in with little effort on there part.

 

[Kangativa]

hey kangativa, i agree with you mate. when inbreeding anything there's an increased chasce of problems cropping up it just comes down to how you do it, what you're selecting for etc. but when it comes to F/F with 2 individuals of the same relatedness as a M/F cross, there should be no difference in viability/genetic health of the offspring. the only difference is that you've forced one of the females to produce male flowers to pollinate the other female. you're not stuffing with the genetics, you're simply creating an environment where those genes can be expressed, if the plant wasn't able to do it it wouldn't full stop.

i do agree that mutations and diseases can be issues with it comes to F/F selfing, though this is rare and if done properly like in any other form of inbreeding, it should be fine. it all comes down to the diligence of the breeder.

thanks for the kind words resin_lung, means a lot

Hi mate.....I was just using the QH industry as an example of how long it took to find a problem.
The problem could lie with the forced bit....What happens if the plant after years and years of being forced adapts to doing it itself.....Ill use another example, lets take the Camphour Laurel, introduced and became a weed on the North Coast, it was toxic to all rainforest species, now 100yrs + Staghorns are growing on them and Rainforest tree's will grow underneath them.....We stuffed with nature and it changed.
If by some distant chance my theory is correct, then people who have kept Landraces and IBL's will be well sort after....lol

 

[Dalaihempy]

Hiya mate shunned and laft at now then taken to curt by large company's saying they own the rights to the genetics you hold lol.

 

[Kangativa]

Hiya mate shunned and laft at now then taken to curt by large company's saying they own the rights to the genetics you hold lol.

Cops and Corperations.....Just no rest is there mate

 

[darwinsbulldog]

Ok hempy, I’m going to go through that entire post and try and explain things, but please be sure to read everything I write thoroughly and with an open mind, forget what you think you know for a minute and see if I can help explain things better. Lol it’s taken me 1hr+ to write this while at work so I really hope it helps and hits home.


Hempy - “Proof that i did research real research on chemically changed female plants turning them to males then pollinating a female clone of its self no i have not as i believe in nature has a reason for evolution and for species to evolve as they have.”

Hempy, these plants have the ability to do this naturally and though it may not be common, it will occur naturally. Cloning is a natural process (it’s not man made). Plant branches that bend down and touch the ground can form roots and become their own separate organism though identical to another. Hermies are natural… we didn’t create them, it’s part of cannabis’s evolution, over the millions of years that cannabis has evolved, it hasn’t be selected against and removed from the plant’s genes.

- Production of new individuals along a leaf margin of the air plant, Kalanchoë pinnata. The small plant in front is about 1 cm tall. The concept of "individual" is obviously stretched by this asexual reproductive process.

So it either serves a positive role in the plants biology – positive selection, or serves no role/no negative role and thus hasn’t been selected against (this is to say it hasn’t caused plants with hermaphrodite genes to be less genetically healthy than those without and so both plants with it and without it survive all the same).

Tom stated this before, you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit, we are just playing with what cannabis has evolved to be able to do already, if it couldn’t do it/didn’t have the genes, we wouldn’t be here talking about this stuff.

Hempy – “I have spoken to some one that has and i know there out come i have read many growers posts that grew the fem seeds and little if any positives to report yet were is the proof from the pro female seeds side real research or science to back there vues ? There is nothing to show me or any one in this post or any person that turning a female cannabis plant using chemicals to then pollinate an identical genetic female of its self has any real positives other than producing seeds from people that seek money for little effort that also feel breeding is well to much effort .”

Hempy, first of all, creating female seeds isn’t just done with one female fertilizing a clone of itself (inbreeding), it can be done with two very distant related females that have both been hermied and fertilize each other (this isn’t inbreeding) and creates seed in the same manor that female/males do, it’s just that all seeds will be female because neither parent was dominant for the male gene (as they weren’t male).

Also plenty of breeders use processes like cubing to inbreed and create seeds that have up to 99.99% of the mother plant’s genes.

Whether you see selfing as having positives or negatives is subjective. If you want seeds that aren’t inbred then yeah it’s a negative, though if you want seeds that have 100% shuffled up and recombined in many different combinations to select for the best combination of the mother’s genes, it’s definitely a positive. And a lot of the breeders want exactly this in order to find the perfect mother plant (to use for cloning, selfing, cross- pollinating or regular mating, whatever). There’s no straight out right or wrong here, it’s all dependent on what the individual person is wanting from their seeds.

No one’s saying that fem seeds are better than regular seeds in every aspect and thus we shouldn’t bother using males ever again. That would be a stupid position to take and if was the case, any sensible person would be against it. I don’t think the market either is trying to phase out all regular seeds, it’s just that there’s an overwhelming demand from personal growers to have access to fem seeds because the average grower doesn’t breed, doesn’t want males, just wants to grow bud for him/herself.

Hempy – “I have seen no research real scientific research on cannabis fem seeds full stop i have read lots scientific research that tells me the positives that sexual reproductions has over asexual reproduction”

Selfing and cross-pollinating by using hermaphrodites is sexual reproduction mate, tomhill has stated this about 1000 times now. Asexual reproduction doesn’t involve gamete production (sperm/eggs), recombination (shuffling of genes in sperm/eggs) or fertilization (sperm meeting egg). Asexual reproduction is cloning in this case. And again it depends what the individual wants. You can’t using cloning as a technique to try and create or select for an improved plant because clones will always be exactly the same as their parents (though mutations can arise and change them over time).

Again there’s no right or wrong, the breeder uses asexual reproduction when it suits him best for whatever he’s doing, and he uses sexual reproduction whether selfing a single female, crossing two females, or male x female.

I think the main issue you have here is that you’re confusing asexual reproduction with sexual reproduction as well as thinking that the creation of fem seeds are only done through selfing one female. Cross pollination of two separate females (unrelated females) can produce fem seed the same way selfing can and is not inbreeding and thus is as good as normal male x female pollination. The only difference will be the proportion of male seeds in each F1 population, where the parents were male x female = F1 50% male, 50% female, where parents were female x female = F1 100% female.

“Sexual reproduction is a biological process by which organisms create descendants that have a combination of genetic material contributed from two (usually) different members of the species. (Self-fertilization requires only one organism.) Each of two parent organisms contributes half of the offspring's genetic makeup by creating haploid gametes.”

if you look further down on this page you’ll see autogamy (self fertilization) under sexual reproduction.

“Autogamy
Self-fertilization (also known as autogamy) occurs in hermaphroditic organisms where the two gametes fused in fertilization come from the same individual. They are bound and all the cells merge to form one new gamete”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproduction#Sexual_reproduction


hempy – “Sexual reproduction requires males but they themselves do not produce offspring.”

That is 100% incorrect. It doesn’t require males, the defining features are production of gametes, recombination, fertilization. This person means it requires a second individual, and just assumes males are the only option (thinking about repro the usual animal sense not in plants). It’s wrong, it may require male PARTS, but hermies are an example where males aren’t needed, 2 females works fine.

the above picture is from one of my lectures. It shows a single species with a mutation of style length. This species is monecious in that each plant has both male and female sex organs in its flowers. The usual length of the style (male organ) is long (pic B and D), with the tip above/outside the female organs so it doesn’t pollinate itself. Though through mutation and natural selection, another type of the species (pic A and C) has a shorter style and mostly fertilizes itself as pollen doesn’t get out of the flower as easily/reach the style inside other flowers. (ps sorry the pic’s blurry it tried to blow it up a little). The reason this would have been selected for is if plants that had the usual long style (that weren’t fertilizing themselves) were unable to fertilize others, due to distance ie. Pollen couldn’t reach other plants, so those that had shorter styles were selected for as they could reproduce with themselves, this is just one example of how selfing IN NATURE is beneficial and can be selected FOR by evolution.

Hempy – “Self-Incompatibility: Avoiding Inbreeding

# Evolution seems to favor (and be favored by) genetic variability.
# Genetic variability is promoted by outbreeding: sexual reproduction between genetically dissimilar parents.
# (Just why sexual reproduction is so popular throughout the world of living things is still a hotly-debated question, but the fact remains.”


self incompatibility is selected for IF inbreeding is an issue in a population and IF those inbred individuals have a lower survival rate than non-inbred individuals. This is sort of proof that marijuana doesn’t have a natural issue with self pollination hempy, if it did it would’ve evolved many years ago away from the formation of hermies or formed a protection against one’s own pollen so that it couldn’t physically fertilize itself. But it hasn’t… though in we can tinker with this and increase the amount of hermies used in breeding, any bad plants that arise will be selected against anyway and tossed out… leaving only the healthiest to continue breeding with.

Here’s a great paper - http://www.jstor.org/pss/2407748

First paragraph reads – “in about 80% of all species of hermaphroditic flowering plants the pollen is INCAPABLE of germinating on the styles of flowers that produce it, a condition known as self-incompatibility (Fryxell, 1960)… self-compatibility does not lead inevitable to self-pollination, and various degrees of selfing and outcrossing can take place (stebbins 1957)…. The general consensus (several refs) is that self-incompatibility is the rpimitive condition in Angiosperms and that self-compatibility is secondary and derived. Since autogamy has evolved REPEATEDLY, the evolutionary and genetic consequences of autogamy are of general interest… autogamy tends to increase inbreeding… it is suspected that the losses due to inbreeding must be compensated for in some way.”

So autogamy is a natural process hempy that has evolved “repeatedly” any many plant species, though it increases inbreeding (and inbreeding has negative aspects, but plenty of positive ones too) it is compensated for in some way… how do we know this? Because if it weren’t, autogamy wouldn’t have evolved in the first place.

I dunno if I can be bothered sifting through the rest of the text here. I’m sure most of it is correct but I think you are misinterpreting the basics and key sections.

Hempy - “Reality is female seeds are now every were and your telling me there a positive thing for the cannabis species well show me why they are but don't tell me there a valuable breeding tool alone that is not a positive thing for the cannabis species that is only a positive for people wanting to cash in with little effort on there part.”

Hempy, the fem seeds aren’t about being a positive thing for the species, if we wanted to conserve the species we would do no inbreeding, and just open pollinate everything with everything to conserve as much variation as possible. Breeders are interested in their own plants, their own populations and their own genes, it’s not about conserving the species (this will be done in the wild anyway). It’s 100% about consumer/demand and what the public wants out of their seeds. We’re not trying to remove all males from the wild and have only hermies. Males as well as hermaphroties are both valuable breeding tools, no one’s saying get rid of one and keep only the other, as I’ve stated it’s just about what you’re wanting to do with your own breeding stock that defines whether males are useful to you or not, or if hermies are useful to you or not. And plenty of people are putting a shit load of effort into femmed seeds, trying to do it in a way that conserves the genes and health of parent plants for their customers as well as themselves, even though there’re surely a few other there who could give a damn. Anyway I hope this has helped mate lol I’ve learned more by researching this all and writing it up this 2000word essay haha.

Darwin.

 

[darwinsbulldog]

Hi mate.....I was just using the QH industry as an example of how long it took to find a problem.
The problem could lie with the forced bit....What happens if the plant after years and years of being forced adapts to doing it itself.....Ill use another example, lets take the Camphour Laurel, introduced and became a weed on the North Coast, it was toxic to all rainforest species, now 100yrs + Staghorns are growing on them and Rainforest tree's will grow underneath them.....We stuffed with nature and it changed.
If by some distant chance my theory is correct, then people who have kept Landraces and IBL's will be well sort after....lol

yeah i get what you mean mate. you have to remember that the QH industry probably had significantly less people involved in it though with respect to breeding/growing the animals as well as their knowledge of genetics and issues so it's understandable that it took so long. DocLeaf stated on this thread or another about femmed seeds that there were issues initially, but they were ironed out.

"Fem. seed makers initially reversed unstable female clones ,, via stress ,, to produce male pollen and backed it to cuttings off the same clone. The female seeds then inherited this stress trait,, and most of them produced seeds or male flowers at the end of flowering.

Today fem. seed makers use Colloidal Silver spray to inhibit the female hormones in a female clone,, so that the male side is expressed... then cross the pollen given onto a different female clone to make a fem. hybrid,,, or the same stable cutting to get consistent seed results. And this new method seems to produce better resulting plants,, IMO... so far.

The stability and quality of a feminized seed line is always subject to the parent(s) used,, like any seeds are,,, and fem. seed makers got smarter in recent years ,, and started to select stable clones as parents to make much more stable resulting female seed stocks from. This is how we see it anyhow,, could be wrong,, have been before,,

In the past,, we wouldn't have dreamt of using a stressed out unstable seed line for breeding (totally out the question) ,,, whereas today after chatting to the breeders that make feminized seeds... we thought we'd give a feminized parent plant a try.

Hope this helps"

so i think the future will not hold too many big surprises with respect to inbreeding and fem seeds, and that if it does we'll be able to overcome them pretty easily. it's always great either way to keep a really healthy free population(s) out in the wild to keep variation up and have back up stocks should we inbred the hell out of current ones. i'm wanting to go collect seeds from the wild in asia one day. would be fun!

 

[freefields]

Reality is female seeds are now every were and your telling me there a positive thing for the cannabis species well show me why they are but don't tell me there a valuable breeding tool alone that is not a positive thing for the cannabis species that is only a positive for people wanting to cash in with little effort on there part.

Of course they are a valuable breeding tool, there are a load of possibilities opened up by the feminising technique that just are not possible with regular male x female breeding.

I'm not going to explain them to you, but I will drop a clue - removal of an intersex trait from a line is much more effectively achieved through feminising.

Hempy, it's abundantly clear that you have many incorrect ideas in you head, you really aren't grasping the real science behind this subject. I strongly suggest you go away and read and absorb this paper, then you might actually be able to construct a cogent argument, at the moment what you are presenting is so wrong it's verging on the ludicrous.

Boys and Girls Come Out To Play: The Molecular Biology of Dioecious Plants

http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/86/2/211

Thanks to englishrick for introducing me to this paper.

I have other papers I've found that are very useful in trying to understand this subject, but Boys and Girls is the best starting point imho.

 

[BrianBadonde]

Of course they are a valuable breeding tool, there are a load of possibilities opened up by the feminising technique that just are not possible with regular male x female breeding.

I'm not going to explain them to you, but I will drop a clue - removal of an intersex trait from a line is much more effectively achieved through feminising.

Hempy, it's abundantly clear that you have many incorrect ideas in you head, you really aren't grasping the real science behind this subject. I strongly suggest you go away and read and absorb this paper, then you might actually be able to construct a cogent argument, at the moment what you are presenting is so wrong it's verging on the ludicrous.

Boys and Girls Come Out To Play: The Molecular Biology of Dioecious Plants

http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/86/2/211

Thanks to englishrick for introducing me to this paper.

I have other papers I've found that are very useful in trying to understand this subject, but Boys and Girls is the best starting point imho.

Whilst a good paper I feel its outdated with regards to Cannabis although at least Ainsworth didn't say its just XY. try these

http://www.nature.com/hdy/journal/v88/n2/pdf/6800016a.pdf
http://www.plantcell.org/cgi/reprint/5/10/1241.pdf
http://jag.igr.poznan.pl/2002-Volume-43/4/pdf/2002_Volume_43_4-451-462.pdf
http://www.amjbot.org/cgi/reprint/94/2/141
http://resources.metapress.com/pdf-preview.axd?code=66dvkww9kq9a7fx6&size=largest

noticed your interest in roots

http://worx.nm.ru/pages/fulltext1.pdf


Whilst cannabis is considered XY its relatives seem to be X:A so cannabis is a mish mash IMO, it seems XY with lots of modifyers as its polymorph.

http://geo.cbs.umn.edu/Datwyler&Weiblen2006.pdf

theres also plenty out there on male markers for cannabis.

have a look at how hop is bred etc a close relative of cannabis. its fem bred TMK.

 

[darwinsbulldog]

Whilst a good paper I feel its outdated with regards to Cannabis although at least Ainsworth didn't say its just XY. try these

http://www.nature.com/hdy/journal/v88/n2/pdf/6800016a.pdf
http://www.plantcell.org/cgi/reprint/5/10/1241.pdf
http://jag.igr.poznan.pl/2002-Volume-43/4/pdf/2002_Volume_43_4-451-462.pdf
http://www.amjbot.org/cgi/reprint/94/2/141
http://resources.metapress.com/pdf-preview.axd?code=66dvkww9kq9a7fx6&size=largest

noticed your interest in roots

http://worx.nm.ru/pages/fulltext1.pdf


Whilst cannabis is considered XY its relatives seem to be X:A so cannabis is a mish mash IMO, it seems XY with lots of modifyers as its polymorph.

http://geo.cbs.umn.edu/Datwyler&Weiblen2006.pdf

theres also plenty out there on male markers for cannabis.

have a look at how hop is bred etc a close relative of cannabis. its fem bred TMK.

some great papers there mate! and a few i haven't seen so thanks a lot for sharing

darwin

 

[Dalaihempy]

hi all lots of reading to be done since i logged in and i will read threw it all to.

Tom stated this before, you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit, we are just playing with what cannabis has evolved to be able to do already, if it couldn’t do it/didn’t have the genes, we wouldn’t be here talking about this stuff.

No you cant make chicken salad out of chicken shit but you sure can turn the chicken used to make a nice chicken salad into shit a long the way before it used to make the salad that is my point mate.

Mate there is a large difference from nature to this and yes cannabis can self pollinate yes cannabis can and dose have a self preservation mechanism even if i am yet to read a research paper on how this comes about i have seen it but in no way is it any thing like spraying a female plant and chemically changing it to a male to then pollinate its self in a different clone or to be used on a different clone of a different species of cannabis.

Only advantages i can see for using such a method is for people that cant breed that would like to run a small number find a nice mum and make seeds for market well look at Spain lots are all ready doing it great advancement for this community and the cannabis species its like the Cain toads they were set free on the environment and years later are doing lots of good yes science has played such a great role model in nature.

 

[darwinsbulldog]

last time i checked the cane toads were doing nothing but bad still in australia and are one of the worst pest species we've ever faced.

you're hung up on the chemicals stuff man, it can be done naturally with stresses by humans or not... using chemicals is just another way of stressing the plant. the chemicals don't change the plant genetically, neither do the natural stresses. so there's not really an issue there at all. with respect to things getting worse down the line at the end of the day that's going to be the fault of the breeder(s) not the biology behind what they're doing. the species will be fine, whether or not breeders screw up and in breed the crap out of all the plants/seeds currently on the market, at the end of the day we could remove all of them over night, go out into the bush collect more seed from thai, mexico, india, etc and be back where we are now within a few short years. i don't think there's really much to worry about at all. if you don't want to use fem seeds you certainly don't have to, maybe you'll end up with no option but to go to mexico and get some seeds out of the wild if you want none from breeders with any history of feminization in their lineage, but the ones in the wild will probably have exactly the same degree of hermaphroditism / intersex recessive traits (if not more) in their genes than the selectively bred stuff you buy over the net.

 

[hoosierdaddy]

Hempy, you are first going to have to have a basic grasp of genetics and breeding. It is apparent that you have came to your own conclusions based on hearsay and internet threads, rather than on real research. Perhaps you think we too are just pulling all of this stuff out of our asses and throwing out there? I can pretty much assure you that anyone who has made and intelligent comments in here has taken the time to do some actual study.

You are going to have to get the basics first, and the only way for you to do that is to actually study pertinent materials.
I have suggested, and will do so again, that you study up on hormones. Specifically ethylene and what it actually does in cannabis. Most all of this is hinged on the manipulation of ethylene in one way or another. And the manipulations that man causes can and do happen in nature the very same way, or at least what the plant knows of, as the artificial manipulations.
And manipulating hormones is basically what it all boils down to, coupled with the hard facts of the genes involved.

While you are googling ethylene and hormones in cannabis (you can find all the info you need in this thread already provided for you by myself), take a look at the term epigenetics. A few threads involving that term here as well.

Once you have a basic understanding of these things, you will be able to see the light much better. Right now, it is being clouded in hearsay, rumor, and unfounded voodoo.

Here is a piece I pirated from another site a couple years back. It is a very good read that can help you get started in your quest for the truth.

Feminized breeding (STS)
Hello friends,

I'm about to start experimenting with STS-based reversals and feminized breeding, and I'd like to share the results with you, so I thought I'd take a moment to define the technical terms I'll be using frequently. If there's any other terms or concepts you'd like explained, let me know and I'll see what I can do.

Terminology for STS breeding:

STS: Silver thiosulfate, a salt compound used in photography. In plants, silver interferes with, or locks out, copper, which is a necessary micronutrient. Making copper unavilable inteferes with ethylene signaling, and reduces expression of traits that are dependent on high levels of ethylene, such as female sex expression and fruit ripening.

Copper: a micronutrient that is necessary to assist certain enzymes in their function. Copper can become toxic at low levels, but a few parts per billion is adequate for plants to express their genetic potential. Because copper is needed at such low levels, it does not take much silver to overwhelm the available copper load and exert its effect.

Ethylene: One of the 5 plant hormones. The levels and ratios of these 5 hormones has a huge impact on the shape, strucutre, aroma, flavor, flowering time, and disease resistance of the plant. Hormones are the chemical messengers that allow DNA to 'talk' to plant tissues and determine the phenotype. Ethylene is primarily involved in flowering, sex determination, fruit ripening, and sensescence (rot). Ethylene is a simple organic molecule, C2 H4, which can also be represented as H2C=CH2.
In cannabis, female plants will produce male flowers if not enough ethylene is present, or if too much gibberellic acid is present. The intersex condition is due to a combination of genetic and environemental factors. Some plants will not turn male under the most extreme stress, and some plants, especially stretchy tropical sativas, will turn with no stress at all. It is my belief that the stress of severe inbreeding, compounded over several generations, is responsible for the majority of hermaphrodites in the drug cannabis gene pool (DCG) today.

Reversal: Treating a female plant with STS in order to collect viable female pollen.

Selfing: Applying female pollen to the female from which it was collected. Example : selecting a particular Willie Nelson cutting, reversing it, and putting the pollen back on another clone of the same plant. Applying that pollen to a different Willie cutting, or to another strain altogether, is not selfing.

F0: The parents selected to start a breeding program. Often referred to as P1 and P2, but this is incorrect.

F1: the first cross between two unrelated parents. The F stands for filial, and refers to the fact that all F1 progeny of the same cross are full brothers and sisters to one another.

S1: The first selfed generation. Selfing an S1 produces an S2, etc. Anecdotal evidence from Sam_Skunkman indicates that continued selfing to the S3 and S4 produces plants so weak that they must be handled very carefully, “like kittens” in his words.

R1's (aka Reversed F1's): When feminized pollen is used to pollinate a different female than the pollen donor. R1's will tend to act like a tradional male x female cross, only all female, while S1's appear to have some different properties that are not yet fully understood. Early reports indicatee that S1's are more consistent than R1's on average, but there are many exceptions, and more research is needed.

BC1: The first backcross generation, ie when an F1 or R1 progeny is crossed back to an F0 parent. Backcrossing can increase the influence of either parent, but continued backcrossing is too much inbreeding, according to both DJ Short and Rezdog, and should be used rarely if at all. One or two backcrosses followed by full-sib mating has beena successful strategy for many breeders, including the creator of Northern Lights.

These terms can be combined for shortand pedigrees. A second backross, followed by three generations of sib-mating, may be represented as a BC2-F3 generation.

Intersex: A condition in which a plant (or animal) displays functional sex organs of both genders. Easier to type than hermaphroditic. My belief is that almost all hermies are genetic females that have weaknesses in their ethylene signaling pathway, which makes them very susceptible to environmental stress.

Stress: Any environmental factor that causes a response by the plant. Stresses can be biotic or abiotic. Biotic stresses include insects, fungi, viruses, predators, and CAMP. Abiotic stresses include drought, poor soil conditions, extreme wind or humidity, or hurricanes or flooding. Both types of stresses can have large effects on phenotype, including induction of intersex phenos.

Hybrid Fertility: The degree to which any two unrelated plants can set seed. For example, crossing an Afghani to a Turk may produce 95% viable seed, whild crossing Durban to Mongolian Indica might only produce 40% viable seed. This is usually a measure of the genetic distance between the parents. The fertility of self-pollinations is unknown but could give the breeder alot of information about the breeding value of the plant in question. A plant that has a desirable phentoype, but is not very self-fertile, is likely very homozygous and will tend to produce consistent offspring.

Micropropagation: Taking very small clones and rooting them in test tubes containing a heat-sterilized nutrient mixture in a agar (gelatin) base. This allows for aseptic (almost sterile) conditioins and precise application of phytochemicals such as STS, auxin, or cytokinin.

Flower parts:

Male:

Petal: the 5 yellow petals surrounding the generative organs
Anther: the banana-shaped pod on a thin stalk that produces and drops pollen
Filament: the thin stalk that supports the anther.
Pollen grain: A tiny, round, hard shell that floats on the wind until it lands on a female stigma.
Sperm: A half-copy of the genetic information of the father. Each grain contains two sperm. One sperm fertilizes the egg and forms the embryon, while the other sperm fertilizes another cell and forms the endosperm, the fatty, protein-rich substance that surrounds the embryon and provides nutrients for the first ~2 weeks of growth. This process is called 'double fertilization' and is pretty cool if you want to read more about it.

Female:

Sepal: the small green leaves subtending (underneath) the petals. The sepals are the strucutres that have two white hairs protruding and are covered in resinous trichomes. They are a leafy jacket for the developing seed. I believe that the evolutionary purpose of THCis to confuse animals, such as mice and voles, that eat cannabis seeds after they fall to the ground. Differences in cannabinoid content probably are due to differences in the brains of the seed predators.

Stigma: The two white hairs that stick out of each flower. Each stigma is capable of accepting pollen and directing it to the ovary, which is located at the base of the seed. The stigma is capable of performing a chemical analysis of the pollen that lands on it, and can decide whether ornot to allow that pollen to germinate and fertilize the embryo.

Ovary: the structure that contains a half-copy of the maternal DNA, which fuses with a sperm to form an embryo that contains 50% DNA from each parent.

Seeds:

Achene: a technical term for the particular type of seed that Cannabis produces. Similar to a nut, but simpler in structure.

Aleurone: the hard, tiger-striped outer shell of a seed that protects the delicate embryo and endosperm.

Vernalization: Any environmental or chemical treatment that induces seeds to sprout. This can be heat, in the case of wild tomato or avocado seeds, or cold, as in the case of poppies and many members of the cabbage family. Some seeds require a bath in acid, as in tomato seeds, which tend to to sprout well when they are incubated in the hot, acidic bath known as the 'stomach' and then deposited in a matrix of rich organic matter, known as 'poop'.

General Breeding Terms:

Compensatory mating: Choosing hybrid parents based on a weakness in one parent. For example, we often choose G13 as a parent when we have a sativa that is quite nice to smoke, but stretchy and long flowering. G13 brings down flowering time and height, without having much impact on the smell or high, except that it tends to boost potency. Another example might be choosing Grapefruit to cross to an indica that is potent, but lacks flavor or 'bag appeal'. Fem breeding makes it easier to choose parents for compensatory mating as both parents can be evaluated for the trait of interest.

Stabilizing Selection: Growing a large number of a a segregating population and selecting the average phenotypes, culling the extreme phenos, in order to lessen the variability in the line. Usually a later step after a line produces some, but not all, exceptional plants. Not used often enough in Cannabis breeding. An example of this would be growing a thousand Love Potions and culling everything that showed a single male flower, so that the genetics of the line would be essentially unchaged, but interesex plants will eventually be completely eliminated.

Directional Selection: Choosing breeding parents based on a desire to boost a trait that is present in both. For example, if you grew out 100 F2's and selected the most purple ones for future breeding, youwould be breeding in the direction of more purpleness without any regard for other phenotypes. When working with very small populations, I believe it is best to focus on one trait a time, rather than trying to find your grail in a population of 30 or 50 beans.

Diversifying Selection: this is a concept more often used in nature, where one populations splits into two and then diverges due to different selective pressures. For example, early humans mated with chimpanzees for many centuries before the different selective pressures caused the two populations to diverge and become reproductively isolated from one another. For Cannabis breeders, this technique could be used to tease out the parent lines from an F1 hybrid. If you bought Thunderfuck Haze, and you had a good eye for both parental phenos, you could eventually have a truebreeding Thunderfuck line and a Haze line that would be more like the parents than like the original F1.

Robustness: A strain that produces similar phenotypes in a wide range of enviroments is said to be robust.

Variability: A measure of the differences in phenotypes within a strain. Some variability is good, for example if you want to harvest over a period of a week or 10 days instead of all at once. Much variablity is bad, for example if your closet has to contain plants that range from 2'-5' tall, or if your harvest window is 2 months instead of 2 weeks and you have other stuff to grow.

Stability: Another way to measure differences in phenotypes. The opposite of Variability.

Diversity: A measure of the genetic diversity within a population. The trick of the breeder is to maximize diversity while minizming variability. Diversity is necessary to allow plants to resist fungi and other pathogens, and to have genetic reserves that will allow the to slowly adapt to a changing climate in the years to come.

Stable Generation: A true F1 made between inbred parents, or a cross between two individuals of the same IBL, will produce seeds that are consistent from plant to plant. F1 plants will grow alike, but will not breed true. IBL's grow alike and will produce offspring that grow alike, both to each other and to the parents. Crossing an IBL to an F1 will produce intermediate results and is a good technique if you have the capacity to evaluate the offspring, or if you are looking for more than one keeper pheno in the progeny.

Segregating Generations: A cros between two hybrids will produce a wide range of phenotypes, especially if the hybrid grandparents are widely unrelated. Segregating generations are where the breeder goes to work, sorting through hundreds of plants to find the ones that meet the goal of the program. Most seeds on the market today are segregating generations.

Hempy, there is no way you can continue on the campaign you are on if you actually do the reading and absorb it. You will realize that your side of the debate holds very little, if ANY, validity.

 

[Dalaihempy]

last time i checked the cane toads were doing nothing but bad still in australia and are one of the worst pest species we've ever faced.

Yes they are bad and who put there in the first place yes science did now look at the natural environment they were put in changed for ever.

you're hung up on the chemicals stuff man, it can be done naturally with stresses by humans or not... using chemicals is just another way of stressing the plant. the chemicals don't change the plant genetically, neither do the natural stresses. so there's not really an issue there at all. with respect to things getting worse down the line at the end of the day that's going to be the fault of the breeder(s) not the biology behind what they're doing. the species will be fine, whether or not breeders screw up and in breed the crap out of all the plants/seeds currently on the market, at the end of the day we could remove all of them over night, go out into the bush collect more seed from thai, mexico, india, etc and be back where we are now within a few short years. i don't think there's really much to worry about at all. if you don't want to use fem seeds you certainly don't have to, maybe you'll end up with no option but to go to mexico and get some seeds out of the wild if you want none from breeders with any history of feminization in their lineage, but the ones in the wild will probably have exactly the same degree of hermaphroditism / intersex recessive traits (if not more) in their genes than the selectively bred stuff you buy over the net.

Mate in nature a female cannabis plant will not change from a female to a male there is a very large difference from natural process found in nature to a human spraying a female and turning it to a male.

As for going back to the starting point if things go bad and going to the bush and re collecting genetics of old good luck on that one you are forgetting the eradication programs in Asia South America and other country's by the us Government spraying chemicals to eradicate cannabis / coco / poppy's the old genetics are not as easy to find as some believe mate modern hybrids that mature faster alone has caused many old genetics to vanish in many eras let alone the Government programs to eradication cannabis.

 

[Dalaihempy]

I know the basics of breeding i have been breeding my own seeds since i started to grow i have past on many many seeds threw the years to friends and there friends i have grown out my ow seeds for decades i know the process of breeding and selection and how a male and a female both play a key role also.

Been breeding dogs for specific hunting environments for decades also seen how the mother and father of different pure lines blend and express in the off spring so i do have some idea but i don't claim to be an expert but i sure as shit know that in nature a female cannabis plant does not turn into a male by being sprayed by chemicals.

 

[BrianBadonde]

Mate in nature a female cannabis plant will not change from a female to a male there is a very large difference from natural process found in nature to a human spraying a female and turning it to a male.

utter tosh, genetically it will not change just like with reversal, though through hormones (which are natural) and through enviroment the sex can appear to change! though it hasn't its transient. Do you understand that at least?

Re: dwarfism that someone mentioned in this thread, it is caused by GA which sets off a mutant gene to do with the bio pathway.