Regular seeds are a popular choice for growers looking to produce both male and female cannabis plants. They are also preferred by breeders who use both sexes to create new strains.
When growing from seed, regular seeds have a 50% chance of producing male or female cannabis plants. However, this ratio can fluctuate.
Breeding
Breeding is a great way to create new and exciting strains. This is especially true of regular seeds, which provide an excellent basis for breeding.
While feminized seed is becoming more popular, many growers still choose to work with regular cannabis seeds for their phenotype diversity and overall versatility. These seeds offer more genetic variation than feminized strains, making them an ideal choice for those looking to expand their crop or discover new phenotypes.
Generally, a 50% / 50% balance of males and females is characteristic of regular seeds. Feminized seeds, on the other hand, tend to produce mostly female plants.
Nevertheless, a small percentage of feminized seeds can end up with male plants. This is due to the intersexual nature of plants. However, there are some feminized seed breeders who have worked to develop stable seeds that minimize these hermaphroditism issues. Some of these breeders use a silver thiosulfate solution to induce pollen sac production in female plants early in the flowering cycle.
Cloning
Cloning is the process of a cutting being taken from a plant that has already started to grow, called a “mother.” It’s a genetic copy of the mother, so it will look and grow just like the mother.
The best type of mother to use for cloning is one that has a healthy, thick stem and multiple leaves. To clone, you will need to cut the plant from its middle or tip at a 45-degree angle.
The next step is to root the clone in a growing medium and use a rooting hormone to encourage it to grow roots. There are many different growing mediums that you can choose from, including rockwool or clay pellets, as well as perlite and vermiculite to help with drainage.
Genetic Stability
When breeding, breeders will stabilise a strain over several generations by selecting and cross-breeding healthy parents. Typically, Mendelian inheritance dictates that 50% of offspring will resemble both parents equally, 25% will express traits closer to the mother and 25% will express traits closer to the father.
Genetic stability testing is often needed by regulatory bodies to ensure that a cell line’s genetic sequence remains stable. Deletions, rearrangements and point mutations can occur during production of a recombinant cell line.
To assess the genetic stability of a recombinant production cell line, a genomics expert can use Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) to perform a full genome sequencing of the cell line. This provides a complete picture of the clonality and identity of the cell line.
Several regulatory bodies also require a mRNA expression stability study to determine the stability of the transgene expressed in the expression vector. Unlike protein expression levels, the mRNA level may be less sensitive to the insertion and can therefore be used as a means of assessing the integrity of the recombinant cell line.
Yield
The yield of regular seed is limited compared to feminized seeds. This is due to the fact that on average, only half of the seeds you get in a pack will produce female plants.
Feminized seeds, on the other hand, will offer you female plants every time! That’s a big difference, and it means that you will naturally get twice as much yield from your stash with feminized seeds.
This is because feminized seeds are a hermaphrodite strain, meaning that they can easily convert to male plants under stress. That’s why if you grow with feminized seeds, you’ll need to be careful not to subject them to stressful growing techniques such as topping, fimming or defoliation.
