Sativied
Well-Known Member
Me too man. My ICE cross apparently has it, while it's the one with more than half (maybe 100% geno but doesn't always express the pheno) whorled... if it didn't have that I perhaps would have been able to finish a whorled strain this year.
At first I thought it just shows how little actual breeding experience there is combined and at what poor level cannabis breeding is. How can you not breed out the most annoying trait after so many years... but hemp research shows cannabis sativa can be a real bitch.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10681-004-4758-7
The sexual differentiation of Cannabis sativa L.: A morphological and molecular study
Maybe there's a complete version online, or perhaps buy it.
Googling that one again also showed:
http://www.bio.uaic.ro/publicatii/anale_biochimie/data/archive/papers/2007/2/2007_Anale_GBM_VIII_f2_l07.pdf
" The most frequent are the monoecious forms, classified in more categories, on a five-point scale, depending on female flowers/male flowers ratio."
"In breeding activity, the early establishment of the sex would be necessary, imposed by the necessity to remove, from agronomic reasons, the male plants or the high masculinized monoecious plants."
Autoflowering and color are qualitative traits (traits a plant has or hasn't, and based on just on or few genes)), height is at least partly quantitative (like yield, thc level, flower duration, which are based on multiple genes). Qualitative traits are very suitable for breeding mendelian style, while for quantitative traits putting the best with the best is usually the way to go (unless you have 1 exceptional small/frosty/fat/fast pheno).
I honestly don't know where intersex fits in. With an early full blown hermi it seems qualitative. It's either monoecious or it isn't.
But with females that spawn nanners in buds, well, as that last pdf says, a five-point scale, depending on female flowers/male flowers ratio, in other words is treated quantitative. Putting the best with the best to breed out traits entirely requires large plant counts and many generations. Basically the second quote from that second article shows also it's treated as a quantitative trait.
While we want to treat it as a qualitative. We don't want to reduce the amount of male flowers to a minimum but breed out the genes that cause it entirely. That requires those genes are replace by a copies that don't result in male flowers which may not exist in a population even though the others usually don't express it. With a quantitative approach you also could still have the same gene in the strain but the plants are vigorous and stable and stress-resistant enough that they never express it. So it's really hard to know for sure that the undesirable genes are actually bred out and can reappear in a later cross where the genes are not sort of balanced out / masked by a combination of superior genes.
I do think crossing hermie with a strain that is known not to hermie would result in plants in F2 that are like the hermie but without the undesirable genetics.
I still plan to try that lab test some day... just wonder if it tests negative for hermie if I can then still stress it or it's offspring to hermie. I unfortunately expect that is the case.
seems like they are miles ahead, that is really motivating me to get a degree in biochem so I can at least be a part of it when legalization goes through 100% yah know? Id hate to see someone like monsanto be the first ones to capitalize on cannabis's legality.
