Regular seed gives growers the freedom to breed plants that display their favourite terpenes, flavour profiles, and colours. This makes them essential for those who want to create the strains of their dreams.
However, these seeds also run the risk of producing hermaphrodite plants if you stress your crop with techniques like topping, fimming, lollypopping, and defoliation. This can be a major headache for beginners.
Breeding
Reproduction is the process by which new individual organisms (called offspring) are produced from their parent or parents. These offspring can be asexual or sexual.
Asexual offspring are created through vegetative propagation such as cloning and cuttings. Sexual offspring are created by pollen from male plants or self-pollination of female plants.
For most breeders, the goal of breeding is to produce a new strain with certain desired traits. This can include a variety of characteristics such as vigor, growth structure, flowering time, wind resistance and aroma.
Cultivated varieties are typically bred by crossing a single male plant with multiple female plants to create F1 hybrids. These hybrid seeds are then used to perform crosses with inbred seed parents to achieve the desired cultivars. This asexual breeding strategy is a highly efficient approach for commercial sinsemilla production.
Cloning
In order to clone a cannabis plant, growers take a cutting from the mother plant and allow it to root in a growing medium. This allows the plant to keep its desired genetics and yield a more consistent harvest.
Cloning also allows growers to save time, as they do not have to wait for seeds to sprout and mature. However, clone plants are fickle and require careful nurturing to produce desirable results.
Scientists use cloning methods to make copies of genes that are useful in biotechnology and medicine. The technique involves inserting a gene into another organism using a carrier, such as bacteria, viruses or yeast cells. The carrier then multiplies, forming a copy of the gene in another organism. In this way, scientists can create plants and animals with specific genetic traits. However, cloning is not without its ethical concerns. For example, the creation of a human clone could lead to moral issues.
Genetics
Genetics determine an organism’s physical and behavioral traits. However, an individual’s environment can also impact those traits, which is often referred to as “nature versus nurture.” The combination of genes and the intracellular or extracellular environments influences an organism’s phenotype.
Previous studies of seed traits have largely used mutant screens to identify genes that influence the phenotype. However, these techniques do not allow for the comparison of gene alterations in different genetic backgrounds. QTL mapping allows for the identification of genetic variants that influence a trait in a natural background.
We performed QTL analysis using the MAGIC lines (Kover et al. 2009b). We estimated genetic variances (Vg) and environmental variances (Ve) for the traits seed weight and number of seeds per fruit. We observed a significant negative correlation between these traits, but the r2 value was low (Table 2). Thus, it is unlikely that the seed size/number trade-off is due to genetic pleiotropy. Instead, causal polymorphism is likely to occur within 200 kb of the identified QTL.
Seeds
Seeds are the means of reproduction for flowering plants. They consist of a miniature undeveloped plant and its food reserves enclosed in a protective seed coat. Most seeds are viable and will grow into new plants if provided with the correct environmental conditions.
A seed’s beauty is also reflected in its surface color, which may be snow white or jet black. The color may form a definite pattern or may be mottled with shades of ivory, tan, brown, steely blue and purplish black.
Seeds are important primarily because they provide food for both humans and wildlife species. They are the primary source of cereal grains like wheat, rice and corn; legumes such as beans and peas; oils for cooking, such as peanut, flax and sunflower; and many other essential products. Seeds contain carbohydrates, proteins, fats and minerals that nourish the embryonic plant inside them. They also contain moisture, which is necessary for germination. Seeds are usually dispersed by birds or wind.
