th3bigbad
Well-Known Member
th3bigbad
420 TIME
Stoner
Join Date: Nov 2006
Posts: 676
permalink
Quote:
Originally Posted by northerntights
polyploidy is when you have the cell of your plants that have multiple copies of the same chromosome, in plants this can be a great thing. Polyploidy is something thats really only caused by a chemical known as colchicine, so toxic one grain can kill you and there is no cure. It used to be used to give better yielding, albeit sterile plants... Ironic it was the US government that pioneered the technology in an attempt to create a THC free marijuana for the creation of hemp during WWII. All they did was get the researchers really high, and give them cancer from the residual toxin. No one uses that stuff anymore since breeding practices have gotten so controlled. so there is the fyi on polyploidy lol. Yet another informative yet rather useless nerd moment!
look what you did, i had to pullout my pocket protector and some old links on this 1. so lets get nerdy up in here.
ok good post for the most part, a few things being off. polyploidial plants arent just caused by colchicine. there are plants and animals that are just born that way. and colchicine is only 1 way of changeing the plants cells. check out gibberellic acids and promalin.
as for it being deadly,,, yeah it can be but not something as small as 1 grain. "Colchicine is Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved for the treatment of gout and also for familial Mediterranean fever, secondary amyloidosis(AA), and scleroderma."
and it is still in use for plants aswell "Since chromosome segregation is driven by microtubules, colchicine is also used for inducing polyploidy in plant cells during cellular division by inhibiting chromosome segregation during meiosis; half the resulting gametes therefore contain no chromosomes, while the other half contain double the usual number of chromosomes (i.e., diploid instead of haploid as gametes usually are), and lead to embryos with double the usual number of chromosomes (i.e. tetraploid instead of diploid). While this would be fatal in animal cells, in plant cells it is not only usually well tolerated, but in fact frequently results in plants which are larger, hardier, faster growing, and in general more desirable than the normally diploid parents; for this reason, this type of genetic manipulation is frequent in breeding plants commercially. In addition, when such a tetraploid plant is crossed with a diploid plant, the triploid offspring will be sterile (which may be commercially useful in itself by requiring growers to buy seed from the supplier) but can often be induced to create a "seedless" fruit if pollinated (usually the triploid will also not produce pollen, therefore a diploid parent is needed to provide the pollen). This is the method used to create seedless watermelons, for instance. On the other hand, colchicine's ability to induce polyploidy can be exploited to render infertile hybrids fertile, as is done when breeding triticale from wheat and rye. Wheat is typically tetraploid and rye diploid, with the triploid hybrid infertile. Treatment with colchicine of triploid triticale gives fertile hexaploid triticale."wikipedia
and i know its kinda lame to post other sites on this 1 but if your 1/2 the nerd i am youll dig this
Advanced Nutrients Medical - Bigger LEaves Via PROMALIN???
bcgrowers title
...