Selfing

BuzzardsBay

Well-known member
Help me out here.
mid I have a female plant that I want to convert to “seed form”
Can I take a couple of clones, reverse one with silver thio, and make seeds?

is it that simple? Would the seeds act like an inbred line, all
seeds like the mother?

Even if the mother was a poly hybrid Since Im
Working with two female (XX) seeds no make is involved and the poly hybrid shouldn’t matter because all the genetics are from one plant
 
Yes, you can take clones from a mother and flip one clone to male and pollinate another female same-clone with it. However, the result is exactly the same as if you take one branch of a female and force it to bloom male flowers. It is similar to a selfed herm female that naturally flips sex and throws males and breeds with itself. The only difference is that the natural herm will have herm genetics, and the plants that you force to flip sexes may (or may not) have herm genetics. Both methods are frowned upon by <most> breeders, as you are going to bottleneck the line as an S1. It is an S1 whether you clone and then breed, or self polinate, or the plants herms and selfs itself on its own. The more desirable method is to force a male and breed it with a different female (even if it an IBL, a cousin or sibling of the mother plant you are breeding with).

Note that you also will also only get female (xx) plants as a result of any force male self-breeding. No genetic males can be produced. So you are still limited in any future IBL breeding. Similarly you can do a 2x2 gene drawing and see that selfing a plant will double up the genetics in half the seeds produced. That is overly simplistic, as there are 10 pairs of chromosomes for a total of 20, and there will be meiosis to mix the genes when the pollen hits the ovum. But you will reduce by half (or at most match) the variability in the genetics in the seeds as a result of selfing. In the case of polyploids, it depends on what number of ploidity you are talking about. Triploids are sterile. With quadraploids, you are mixing 4 pairs of genes instead of two. Thus there will be greater potential diversity in the resulting seeds, but you will still have a genetic duplication in half the genes, and you will still bottleneck the resulting lines in the prodigy. Again, not desirable in most cases. There may be some rare recessive gene that you want though, in which case you may want reduced genetics to remove some dominant genes. It gets complicated.

As for seeds being like the parents, I have found that to be highly variable in Cannabis strains. In apples and avocados, maybe only 1 out of 1,000 or even 10,000 seeds are going to be like the parents due to the genetic variables and diversity in those plants. As a result the seeds of apples and avocados are said to be, "not true to type". I have found Cannabis to vary from true to type to not true to type. Some breeders these days purposely breed seeds that when bred again as IBL, will not be true to type. I have found Cannabis to be less true to type in lines with complicated hybrid backgrounds, like in GDP. Similarly I have found that once you cross a sativa with an indica, the hybrid genes splatter and you can get a huge array of resulting traits for several generations. There is much debate about this and with stabilizing lines of new hybrids. With long term landraces, say like original South African and Mexican lines, I have found that the seeds when grown and bred IBL tend to be true to type. They grow like their parents, and their grandchildren grow true to type. Only after 3 or 4 generations in one place do they start gene switching and adapting to local environments. The genetics stay the same in that case, but gene switching occurs to adapt and change the pheno- and chemo- types. Same genetics, different result. Many consider this as genetic drift. But it is not (in almost all cases) due to mutations in this short a time.
 
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