Acclimatization of cannabis, creating traits that didnt exist.

[smurfin'herb]

Hey fellas. Ive been interested in breeding as of late. Its the area of cannabis i am most lacking in. You may see me here more frequently from now on.

A few q's to get started...

How do breeders breed selectively for traits such as mold resistance, heat resistance, pest resistance ect...? Do they intentionally house growrooms with pests and then see which plants do best over generations? Same goes for humidity and heat, do they up it? OR.. do they simply breed with "pre-fab" tried and true strains for these resistance traits instead of landrace..?

On the same subject, how are traits created in the first place? Where do they come from...? For instance, If a foreign family of plants from a dry climate are moved to a different place in the world. They will now be growing in a humid area every season lets say. Then natural selection will reveal a mold resistant trait in successive generations. How does it form? Where did it come from? Was anything sacrificed in order to gain this new trait? And how long does it take to achieve this under human selection in controlled/manipulated conditons? People breed with traits that are already present most of the time, and im trying to figure out how to make these traits in the first place without introducing any outside varieties or "pre-fabs" as i like to say haha! Do any breeders currently do this..? Creating traits in a line that once were not there AT ALL, simply by modifying the environment or feeding over generations?
OR.. is it just that out of that whole family that moved to humid climate, a few plants had a dormant/recessive or even pre-existing gene that was responsible for mold resistance and they were the only ones to survive out of the colony and then passed that gene on to future progeny. So in this case the gene was really there the whole time and didnt come out the sky like i stated above... Any info helps guys, thanks. S'h

 

[Yaxo]

Under thousand plants you may find the trait one time, but as you start working with that specific plant it gets easier as you already have the trait, only having to breed it in

 

[MadBuddhaAbuser]

Most breeders work with proven resistant strains.

The traits are contained within the plant to begin with. Other words, naturally occurring. They may not show it in standard conditions, but will be present in negative conditions.

You won't be able to take a spider mite magnet and create a resistance by only working with that plant, short of gene therapy. You can however get lucky and find something in that same line. Or introduce a resistant variety and try to breed it out best you can.

Good luck.

 

[Lammy]

DJ Short, I believe, makes something out of nothing. After reading his book I've decided that takes to much time. I'll stick to buying my seeds.

You'll need genetic diversity to find the traits you want. Male and female plants pass on different traits.

 

[Nunsacred]

All flowering plants have a great deal of redundant, inactivated DNA.
A lot of that is multiple copies of the active working bits, sometimes mutated or sometimes just older versions.

Under stress and lucky conditions, some of those bits can be activated and there you have an unexpected trait 'appears' in the line. Actually it was there all along.

Going back a long, long way there was an ancestral plant with a certain number of chromosomes (can't remember but I think it's 2n=14).
That might have been truly 'diploid' at some early stage, with predictable breeding rules, when no mammal was around to see it, but since then all plant breeding has been complicated by multiple copies of genes and there are no straight simple definite answers anywhere anymore.

 

[Nunsacred]

Having seen your confusion in another thread, smirf,
I'm going to say that new genes can be created from scratch, sometimes a combination in a plant is completely new, but this is quite rare compared to reactivation of something that was already there.

 

[MadBuddhaAbuser]

Well yeah, there are random mutations occasionally, but hoping for that you might be waiting a while.

 

[simple gardener]

The theory is that new genes first appear in the Y chromosome via info trasmitted from the environment (mutation), and after many generations translocate to the two X chromosomes then eventually to the autosomes. So the answer is yes, but it will take a while.