Breeding for Frosty vegetative leaves

Breeder's Lab
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Hi Breeder,

I few weeks ago, while browsing pictures of frosty buds, I came across a discussion on collecting frosty sugar leaves for making bubble hash.

That got me thinking… :thinking:

Sugar leaves develop close to buds, and probably, due to the high concentration of flowering hormones, they start producing lots of trichomes.

As it’s not universal, and some strains have frostier sugar leaves, there must be a strong genetic component to this phenotype. They key takeaway is that leaves can, in the right situation, produce a lot of potent trichomes.

I’ve asked a few breeder, and have heard that’s it’s not uncommon to see slightly frost vegetative leaves in really good strains. This makes me think that there is probably a hormone receptor in the vegitative leaves that is either a) much more sensitive to the flowering hormones, and b) potentially when can find a constitutively active mutant that has a phenotype that acts like there’s always high amounts of flowering hormone present. This would be the same as for auto flowering plants and florigen.

Now, why would this be interesting?

In some crops, such as tea, the bushes are constantly harvested. Imagine if we had such a mutant strain…

You could grow constantly at optimal lighting, maybe even 24/0, and continuously harvest leaves for bubble hash production. You could grow a plant to fit any sized grow box, just trim it to fit. And finally, the overall yield per unit time might be great, as you don’t ‘waste’ the seedling and vegetative stage, you just stay in permanent vegative state.

I’m looking for feedback on this idea, and more importantly, to suggest to keep an eye open for good starting points for this project! If you see a frosty plant, even if it’s not growing optimally (it’s dwarf or splindly etc), maybe you could grow it out and donate seeds/pollrn to get this project going?

Update

I’m looking for good genetics to start this project! Found a seedling that
seems weird, sticky and stinky? Don’t cull it! Send it this way!

If you already have a strain with this trait, share some seeds!

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Trichomes with THCA and other goodies start to form when the plant triggers flowering hormones,so no way you can grow that type of trichomes during vegetative phase.
You have trichomes in veg state but It Is not the type you re looking for.

As far as frost leaves instead there are plenty of strains that grow frosty Sugar leaves and also some that grow frosty petioles.

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The plant will not start producing the trichomes needed until it is flipped into flower.

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Leaves stink for making high end, best grades of bubble when compared to buds. They leave much more contamination in the product than equal amounts of flower. Mind you we are only talking about a small but niticable difference but you can taste it and see it when it melts in glass. Leaves also bind on mixing tools in a way that buds do not while processing. When in a situation where there is an abundance of fresh flower for material I choose to compost all the leaves, big and small, the bubble hash using only fresh frozen buds it makes is so delicious, you can taste when you get it right.

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Quick Note: Sorry if this reply is both overly technical and also wrong! In my PhD I did a lot of protein engineering, but not in plants. I’m making a lot of assumptions, but I see the science of cannabis flowering is not that complete. Also, I don’t have the time, resources or interest to do proper MolBio research.

@Andrexl Totally agree that the trigger for trichome production are the flowering hormones. When they are present, the leaf shape is smaller and ‘frostier’ in ‘sugar leaves’. I’m making the assumption here that sugar leaves are basically the same as vegetative leaves, but strong modified for flowering hormones.

I’m also pretty sure that hormone sensitivity is a selectable trait. Florigen is a protein hormone, so slight variations in the receptor structure would lead to huge variations in activation. It’s also a highly conserved domain in flowering plants. You can’t mess with a conserved domain usually without killing the organism.

My argument is basically:

  1. If there are ever any trichomes present on vegetative leaves, they could be increased by selective breeding. The answer seems to be ‘yes’, it’s sometimes seen. @Pjhunt78 this was mentioned on the mutant madness thread.

  2. If trichomes are present, and can generate THC, selective breeding can increase the yield and quality.
    We know sugar leaves can produce lots of cannabinoids, so it seems likely that the trichomes occasionally present on larger vegetative leaves might also produce cannabinoids. @Mordecai Wouldn’t this be a chicken-and-egg problem? You don’t use leaves because they suck and buds are better. Sure, but have we spent 2 decades selectively breeding better vegetative trichomes? I would suggest that maybe it’s possible, and would be an interesting project.

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In theory yes this is something that could be selected for but i don’t think you could do it with the current state of cannabis breeding. We’re in the stone ages compared to big AG in terms of breeding for specific traits. Very soon we will see some very interesting science finally applied to cannabis and actual research.

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What I Remember Is that trichomes in larger leaves,in veg phase,are not glandular,usually are stalks and don’t store the precursor for THCA and other cannabinoids.

What I m sure about tho Is that they leave some scents in your hands when you touch the leaf.

If we want to change that we Need to manipulate the plant biology,be It by selection or by genes

Let s Say we want the plant to grow a lot or totally glandular trichomes with cannabinoids all over the older vegetative leaves and newer growth since we switch to flower or the plant does It(automatic plants),then this in my opinion could be done by time for sure,but the plant is always on Flower stage when It starts to grow those.

I Don’t know if we can ever let the plant grow those kind of trichomes during veg stage

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We already skipped this in big science land, in Israel they figured out how to basically grow raw trichomes in a bioreactor. Check out BioHarvest.

I don’t think it would ever be a worthwhile exercise to GMO or breed pot plants to skip flowering and perpetually harvest specialized sugar veg leaves. Very common question we ask ourselves, “is the juice worth the squeeze”. I think the answer here is clearly no, the juice would not be worth the squeeze. Really fun thought experiment tho.

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@Andrexl The sugar leaf trichomes are glandular though, it’s pretty visible on up-close shots of frosty buds. My point is it’s not just buds that can produce glandular trichomes!

Sugar leaves (a type of leaf, not a type of bud) can produce trichomes with high levels of cannabinoids. Therefore, all leaves, with the right phenotype, have this inherent ability. That means that there is at least a hypothetical way forward with selective breeding and that we don’t need genetic engineering (or even to know the whole flowering pathway)

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In my mind you were asking for turning all the vegetative leaves equal to Sugar leaves.

Yes I know Sugar leaves have glandular and I use them when they are a lot.

Sure enough you can breed for more Sugar leaves/frostier buds and leaves

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@logangrowgan2020 TBH, even producing in a bioreactor seems overkill. There’s always cheaper and easier synthetic route to cannabinoids being developed.

I also think even discussing GMO cannabis is pointless. The actually process is relatively straightforward, and much easier than cell culturing mammalian cells. But working with agrobactium and tissue culture is just really expensive. Even a hobby-level PCR machine is a few hundred dollars. The reagent and constant maintenance is just not "hobby-level’; imagine producing and purifying your own Polymerase alone! Way too much work, and lab-reagents are non-trivial to purchase for most people.

But, as far as breeding goes, I think the juice is definitely worth the squeeze! Then again, as I’m also a huge fan of Dooligah ABC and Freak mutations. Are they super beneficial? Not sure, but they are subjectively awesome!

I would love to see a big, frosty, stinky plant! Even it the overall yield was small, its would make an amazing plant to breed.

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I ve grown Berry freaks and yes they are awesome,their glandulars were all over big fan leaves.
But they are fascinating for the pinnate trait,not much else,given trichomes were not good for Bubbles hash making.

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@Andrexl Not surprising they suck for bubble hash, but were they the target of selective breeding to increase yield, or was it just a 'side-effect"?

That’s exactly :100: what I want to do!

Whats cool about this project would be the speed! Instead of waiting for flowering, you cull plants with no leaf trichomes, and breed from the best based on an analysis of the trichomes, weeks before buds even start to develop!

Has anyone reading this thread some good starting strain seeds to share? (visible trichomes in the vegitatve phase, regardless of potency). Or some tips on strains I should be looking to buy?

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If you can do this, https://chemistry.berkeley.edu/news/yeast-produce-low-cost-high-quality-cannabinoids
why grow a plant? Just harvest the goodies, and be done with it.

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As far as I understand it, the trichomes are always there and plants are only “frosty” when they’re large enough for us to see - lots of plants are covered in trichomes but we can’t tell because they’re too small. Doesn’t make them any less effective to smoke. Kinda seems like you’re trying to recreate Cookies - breeding for visuals rather than actual effects.

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@webeblzr Because I want to breed a new kind of dank frosty mutant cannabis.

@Cormoran Could be the case! But visible trichomes means easiest bubble hash. I don’t think we’ll ever reach a state where you’d want to smoke the leaves. Also, leaves currently have much, much lower levels of cannabinoids. I want these in easily seperably trichome glands.

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Where is @JoeCrowe when we need him!?

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Sure I can drop some truth bombs!
OK so never make your hash out of vegging plants. The reason is the trichomes are too small to properly separate with the bubble bags. Leaves have a really terrible plant fiber to trichome ratio, so they make shitty hash with lots of fibers. Are there some trichomes in veg mode to make hash out of? Yes. Auxiliary calyx will grow trichomes that pretty much reach maturity in veg. There are no quantities of trichomes worth of making hash on there. OK also, in veg your plant hasn’t produced enough material to make hash. Just think: smaller plant, smaller yield. So to increase the yield, the plant has to grow large anyways, so blooming it makes sense, because it gets huge.
Alright, so how DO we make this holy grail hash plant? E-Z: take two S-class hash producers, and hybridize them. Grow the progeny.
How do we determine this magical S-class plant? By counting the trichomes on a single bud. It should have more than 40 capitate trichomes per 250,000 square micrometers of bud surface in veg mode. Yep, you heard me right. Determine hash yield in veg mode before even blooming it.

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@JoeCrowe thanks for the info!

The idea is that the whole plant (at some future point after intensive selective breeding), would have a vegitative state where all the leaves looks like S-class sugar leaves (slightly curled with sugar rails).

Now, if the hash from just sugar leave is any good is another question, I don’t have any experience here, and would be interested to hear more!

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You raise some interesting points. Over the last few years I’ve been working on a few of the things you bring up.

At the same time I’ve been working on pushing the limits of autoflowers. Trying out a lot of stage cropping and running then twice as long as anyone typically would. The results have been fascinating. Some of them will grow continuously in a 24 hour light period beyond 6 months from seed.

Different autoflower genetics react differently, but I see a future when autoflowers can get two solid harvest a year. However, with diminishing returns, so two rounds of plant from seed is probably better.

Some of the autos I’ve grown have surprisingly smokable resin around 40 days. This is one of the frostiest I’ve come across. Iirc this was slightly less than 50 days and was done before 70. It had browning stigma before other plants were even getting them en masse. I was able to stage crop and get a lot if additional growth by running it another 50ish days. The leaves almost resembled a

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I also have some clone only plants known for hash, and their leaves get pretty obscene. The Mac Daddy cut from mobile jay is one, and it’s noticeable how much stickier the leaves are in veg compared to most other strains. This sticky leaf trait in veg is something I keep an eye out for when I hunt. It’s also related to vigor and the health of the grow, and I don’t believe it’s only genetic.

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