when is it considered a new strain

I'm about to embark on the "collective info" post journey of a read but I'm curious when do you consider crosses a new strain if you cross say white widow and big bud now u have a "big widow" but the traits aren't really locked in so how many in breedings until you would consider that a solid strain that would produce consistent traits?

when a 'breeder' thinks they can sell the seeds
which actually is a pretty low bar

So theoretically if you cross 2 plants and call the seeds something if someone is willing to buy it then whammo that's the new strain?... there isn't even a bar set then lol thx for the info

Wikipedia puts it nicely: "The term [strain] has no official ranking status in botany;"

When you cross two strains you have a cross and imo should refer to it as such. In practice growone is right though.

mjpupil said:

but the traits aren't really locked in so how many in breedings until you would consider that a solid strain that would produce consistent traits?

Click to expand...

That specifically depends a lot on your selection. You can inbreed endlessly and not end up with a strain that is uniform for all relevant traits if you pick the wrong ones as parents (e.g. heterozygous instead of homozygous). So there's no set number of breedings to achieve those results, unfortunately The F2 will have more variation than F1 (to create a new strain you create variation first) which you start to stabilize in F3, and will take several more generation before you end up with a stable iBL, and requires growing out a lot of plants.

I think thats my perception of the "sad truth," you cross whatever you want and you have a new strain..

..its up to you how professional and stable of a strain you want to call your own.

or as someone recently told me, "there are many strands of marijuana available in colorado today.."

^ hahahahaha..... (palm-to-face)

Thanks for the info everyone I appreciate it

Hmm... i tend to think that a new named strain should be Stable, and named according to its characteristics, and/or its parents (which are not mutually exclusive).

But "should" and "is" are often quite disparate. It seems that some "breeders" are merely chucking pollen and calling 1st gen crosses a "new strain."

If you have to "pheno hunt" to get a plant that actually delivers the characteristics used to market the seeds, that's not really cool. But that's apparently how things are being done in the biz these days.

A "strain" doesn't "have" the marketed characteristics (often the ones from which it derives its namesake), unless all (or the vast majority) of its variations produce those characteristics. If it's not pretty much a sure thing that you're going to get the characteristics for which the "strain" was named, then IMO, it's not yet refined enough to be a named strain. They need to keep refining it until deviations from the namesake characteristics are minimized. Otherwise, they should just name it "parent1 x parent2," and name it later, once it's stabilized. So, if you see something like "NL x WW," that's better than a 1st gen cross called "NW" or "WL."

All "IMO" of course. I've had a personal interest in naming conventions of all things for a long time. (why we call things what we call them)

Then again, what's in a name? I suppose OTOH, anyone can call anything whatever they want, even if it doesn't make sense, or seems wrong or contrary or counter intuitive.

not technical by any means but i hear people say all the time the f5 is when a cross becomes an ibl generally speaking.
this.is of course just forum heresay so treat it.as such but the questiom doesnt have a conclusive answrr imo, its up to the community i guess

mjpupil said:

I'm about to embark on the "collective info" post journey of a read but I'm curious when do you consider crosses a new strain if you cross say white widow and big bud now u have a "big widow" but the traits aren't really locked in so how many in breedings until you would consider that a solid strain that would produce consistent traits?

Click to expand...

It's a new strain when I say its a new strain!

I consider a new strain.. something that hasn't been reproduced.. with the exact same plants.. and has been worked enough to put out maybe a few different phenotypes...

something that's not a strain.. is a simple cross.. lol.. when u pop 10 seeds.. and get 10 completely different plants.. that doesn't ccount FOR ME atleast.

A stable strain is one that has been bred passed f6 into or beyond f7. Should only have one pheno eventually.

Ive always been under the impression that IBL = f7

Some say F5, some say 6, now 7... What matters only is the selection the breeder makes. It indicates the generation it does not dictate stability. Theoretically an F3 can be more stable and more uniform than an F10 generation.

All F3 offspring can already be entirely homozygous for all the visible traits and as stable as it gets for both pheno and genotype. F2 already contains plants with homozygous genotypes, if you pick and mate two of those you get a homozygous pure line true bred super stable strain. The traits inherit independently (segregated inheritance), so the number of plants that have all the traits you want and in homozygous form are very rare and it would obviously require a lot of luck.

For example, the classic example:



(S is dominant smooth round trait, s is recessive wrinkled trait, Y is yellow dominant trait, y is recessive green color trait. Side note: dominant and recessive is relatively, eg. red could be dominant over yellow, making yellow recessive... yes that simple).

If you select a plant with the genetic make up of the top one in the F2 gen, the SSYY, and cross that with another plant with that same genetic make up, all the F3 (and F4 and on) will be SSYYxSSYY = SSYY as in all smooth round yellow.

Same thing for the one below it, pick two F2 plants with SSyy and all the offspring will be SSyy.

Same for ssyy x ssyy and ssYY x ssYY.

If the goal is smooth round yellow as the only phenotype even crossing SSYY with ssyy (green and wrinkled) will result in a single smooth yellow phenotype (SsYy). That's the goal many breeders aim for, reducing phenotype variation. To create a true bred homozygous "strain" that will also produce offspring with the same reduce phenotype variation (generation after generation) the genotype variation also needs to be reduced, which limits the amount of suitable plants to those that are homozygous (so you never get the Ss or Yy combination but only SS or ss and YY or yy).

As shown in the F1 above for example, if you'd select and cross two SsYy plants (smooth round yellow) from the F2 generation you'd end up with exactly the same variation in F3 as you had in F2, including some green and some wrinkled again.

Obviously with more relevant traits in the mix the variation increases exponentially and obviously for some breeders it will take longer than others (luck factor playing a larger role too). You can pick smooth yellow for 10 generations and still produce green wrinkled in the offspring (as long as there's s and y in the mix they will be recombined in some offspring).

Anyway, point is not at all that F3 is IBL or stable already, point is F6 or F7 may be considered IBL, it does not automatically mean it's homozygous as in a stable IBL.