Environment
So sad the groundhog destroyed all my salad greens just the other day. Grrrrrrrr.
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If we are talking smoke quality and ignore yield etc imho Iād go genetics first and then put environment and nutrition on the same levelā¦ If the genes for good traits arenāt there, the best thing a grower can do is to produce a plant with sub par smoke, there might be lots of it; but itās always going to be averageā¦ on the other hand, a less than ideal environment and. nutrition, so long as the plant survives and the genetics for good traits are there will drastically effect the size of the plant and yield etc but the tiny amount of smoke you might get in general shouldnāt be all that differentā¦
In reality itās slightly more complicated because the interaction between environment and genetic expression is significant and variable.
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I agree, I still think genetics, cause you can have equally good skill sets that grow top notch in any of the various systems and environments, but what makes the real top top notch stand out? I think itās, unique terpene profiles and unique types of high that come from unique phenoās of unique strains.
I feel you can include all the factors, yield, potency, vigor, etc; but yeah I put smoke quality as highest factor for me too.
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This is a point I have been trying to get my head around lately. So, how much does environmental factors impact genetic expression? I want to understand this significance better.
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As long as your environment is reasonable I wouldnāt expect much difference.
There is no perfect environment. Itās more of a range.
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What if your environment is less than ideal; like say one were to toss some flowering girls that had been pollinated outside in April in New England. They would seed out, and sort of stay in flower for some time, but not really stay in flower cause the days are getting longer. But they will produce seed. Is the seed good?
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The same cut can definitely vary widely in different circumstances. Imo itās like the same sort of idea as taking identical twins or clones of a person and raising them halfway across the world. Thereāll be baseline similarities and theyāll be recognizable as each other but will also have their own unique differences. How that plays out is mostly gonna be based on what specific environmental factors are different
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I like this take- a specific genetic line might be so hardy that it will grow well in conditions that other lines simply could not.
However, I also think environment might ultimately be the most important factor because at some point, a cannabis plantās just not gonna survive if youāre fucking up too much in the environment. You can feed a plant very little and itāll still live. If shit freezes too much or gets moldy or too hot, at some extreme every plant will die no matter what the genetic
Thereās no easy answer is thereā¦skills do play a role in expanding and creating genetics, so maybe it is grower know-how that tops all?
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Lol. This is a long, complicated and sometimes controversial topicā¦ the study of epigenetics is still r young and currently there is not enough research/data into the interactions of genes and epigenes with the environment to be able to determine the exact influences on phenotypical expression. It wasnāt that long ago that the idea of environmental influence on heritable genetic factors was considering heresyā¦
So as I understand it anyway (anyone with greater knowledge please feel free to correct) phenotype expression involves epigenetic processes around the transcription of DNA and RNA into the proteins that define the overall form and function of any organism. .
So there are various epigenetic factors that donāt involve changes to the underlying DNA but instead effect the how much or how little a genetic trait is expressedā¦ For example, methylation of DNA leads to transcriptional silencing and represses the expression of a characteristic/s, histone methylation can lead to silencing or expression depending on the amino acids targeted, histone acetylation enhances transcription and therefore expression etc.
Some factors driven by epigenetic process in plants include vernalisation and seed dormancy, photoperiodism, heterosis among other thingsā¦
For cannabis the obvious examples of this are the differences between indica and sativa where vastly different environments have made major impacts on how the plants look and flower etcā¦ this may be a controversial statement btw.
Anywayā¦ you can get a good idea of this by growing clones of the same plant indoors and outdoors and often you will find the plant is vastly differentā¦ so then over time if the environment was to remain radically different, epigenetics plays a big role in the phenotypes thatās will become dominant over time in that environment.
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Thanks, thatās a good intro, I should prolly get a book for this one. lol, this thread needed some lighter energy anywho.
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I think this thread is very educational and indicative to making growers better at what they do from food to smokeā¦
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I canāt speak to what will happen in your extreme seed making scenario. I probably wouldnāt trust them because grow space is a valuable commodity. I donāt know if you can make seed with a reveg.
Mostly what youāll do is stunt growth if you make them too unhappy. I had a plant that I ignored all through flower. I didnāt even water it. It yielded 6 grams. Had I cared for it it would have done much better.
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Hear hear! Iām loving all these well thought out and in depth answers. If itās becoming the best growers we can be that really makes the most difference, then these kinds of conversations make the plants grow strong and healthy!
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In short yes, the environmental impact on the phenotypes is unknown and in the next generation you are likely to pick the best pheno to continue the line anyway. What you are describing is no different to the common Indoor practice of pollinating a female while on a 12/12 light schedule and then once there is visible seed set changing the schedule to 18/6 to speed up the development of the seeds.
The downside I have found with this is that itās harder to harvest seeds from a plant that is in reveg and I seem to get more empty seedsā¦ though I donāt know if this is driven by extra heat etcā¦
What can set you back is the fact that you are relying on a single plant for pheno selection to continue the lineā¦ this is like a self enforced bottleneck. You basically get no say in the selection process.
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As opposed to doing an open pollination w various menās and womenās around to start a breeding project? Is this how you would avoid the bottleneck you are describing?
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Thatās one way. Another way to reduce bottlenecking (though not entirely avoid it) is to use hit multiple males on the same female, or vice versa, when making a batch of seeds.
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Ok thx that makes sense.
I had three guys hanging w that lady I posted earlier.
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That would also give you little control over selection, which can be something you might want sometimesā¦ but not normallyā¦ that said genetic variability is the driver of the whole adaptation/evolution process so if you want something unique, outstanding and adapted to your environment then you might start the selection and breeding process by casting your net as wide as possible, so semi open pollinationā¦ I always remove the shitty plants of any type, because although they may contain genetics that might be something I want, they are not expressed and all I can go by is what I can see, unless I had some massive multi line breeding process so that I could produce hundreds of offspring crosses and map the outcomes down multiple generations etcā¦
Again this is probably a controversial thing thing to say but , imho ārealā breeding requires hundreds, preferably thousands of plants to select from, itās long process of creating big populations and then selecting for the traits you want, crossing them, refining it again and repeating this about 12 times by which time you may end up with something good, you might also end up with something average but at least itās going to breed trueā¦ in agriculture lots and lots of lines become extinguished before they ever make it to be a commercial cultivar, itās entirely possible and even likely that continued inbreeding will result in the accumulation of deleterious genetic expressionā¦ so called āinbreeding suppressionā I.e the opposite of heterosis or hybrid vigour. Thatās the reason why virtually all large commercial crops are F1 hybrids rather than pure inbred lines. Inbreeding introduces or magnifies genetic errors; for simple examples of this, just spend some time in West Virginia 
ā¦
So I guess thatās why breeders like Bhodi rely on stabilised inbred lines as ābreeding toolsā with the actual seeds nearly always as far as I can tell being F1 hybridsā¦ACE do this as well, and probably many more do. My speculation only howeverā¦
Again though it gets complicated because of the fact that itās reasonably rare for traits to be the result of a single allele or location, and itās frequently a number of them that to combine to result in a traitā¦ so called āMendelianā and Non Mendelian inheritanceā and not all plants will pass on or inherit genetic characteristics the same etc. itās partly why plant breeding is still part art, part science I guess
The future of plant breeding it seems to me is in marker assisted breeding which relies on the identification of the specific allles or combination of alleles that contribute to a trait in a genetic sequence. So then a āmapā of the genetic sequence is made with tags or markers placed in locations along the sequence that drive a particular characteristicā¦ this is like a template to work toā¦ then all offspring are genetically sequenced and compared to this āmapā to see if they expression at a given allele is dominant or recessive and to what degree it is expressed etcā¦ then only the offspring that most conform to the āmapā are selected for and used to continue the breeding processā¦ it takes a shitload of guess work and trial and error, and inevitable dead ends away from the whole processā¦
I tend to only chose the plants with the attributes I am after to be involved in continuing breeding down the line, rather than āopen pollinationā.
This is how would normally start a pheno selection, with lots of seeds for lots of potential things to select from. this one is me trying to find a good Cindy 99.
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God damn. If you need to get rid of some of those c99ā¦
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