Male clones transformed to Female to judge male smoking quality

Hello Sam, JLP.

Do you guys still work with ethylene on males? Any news?

I've tried 2ml/l and 8 ml/l on 2 clones of a very vigorous Thai male and on 2 clones of a very hardy Ak47.
With not much success. The Plants started to show pistils around the end of week 2 but didn't produce enough female flower to smoke before they withered and died after ~5 weeks.
I expected the Thai to be more resillient, since it never stops growing in the first 6 weeks of flower (3 inches/day!). Even the AK47 which can take a lot of abuse without much growth impairment just yellowed and dropped it's leaves.
It seems the growth-retardant property of ethylene application is hard to work around.

the only way i could see this being effective is too clone some males and induce female flowers too see which males have the desired flowering traits for cross breeding.
it would allow you too actually make sure your male has good genetics... i would like too hear if anyone actually does this.
its quite amazing how we can fiddle with nature so much!

Sam_Skunkman said:

I am not sure but I don't think so, try it. I have heard that this method make females that are often sterile, but even if not sterile, to make all male seeds is not so simple as this. With females that are turned male there is no Y only XX so you get all female seeds, when a male XX is crossed with a normal XX female. With a male turned female both X&Y are there so I doubt a female transformed to male will make all male seeds.

Maybe you need to find or make a super male YY and cross it times a normal XX female, you should get all XY, male? I think so.

-SamS

Click to expand...

suzycremecheese said:

Sam,
it sounds like a great idea... a good place to start narrowing the field in terms of potency, but I don't think it will account for combining ability. If you manage to do some legitimate studies comparing the male flowers with the daughters they produce that will be some ground breaking work. Can't wait to see it...

Sam_Skunkman said:

Maybe you need to find or make a super male YY and cross it times a normal XX female, you should get all XY, male? I think so.

-SamS

Click to expand...

That is a technique commonly used in asparagus breeding. The male is the desired sex in asparagus production so breeders find a superior YY male and cross it with a superior female so that all resulting seeds are male. As you mentioned it remains to be seen if YY males would even survive/ germ/ reproduce in cannabis. I imagine it would be easy enough to figure out by sexing a thousand plants and checking your male/female ratio... who knows YY males may even look different than normal males.

Producing YY males may have countless uses. In breeding and evaluating genotypes... etc.

Click to expand...

i have heard this from the days of CW and have waited to comment, hoping someone else would point this out.

asparagus populations have natural polyploids.

original super males were developed from natural ploids.

today the asparagus super males are produced in a lab from doubled haploids.

there are no yy cannabis plants.

learn on

Sam any updates?

a curious bump...

This thread perked my interest highly.

Yes updates please!

I wonder if Sam was able to tweak the regime so as to not kill his plants? It would appear the ethylene causes poisoning to the plant as Chimera's plants seemed to have the same problems as Sam's, except reportedly having produced viable seed stock with a tweaked regime. I am curious if Chimera used commercially available products he mentioned like Pistel or Florel or was able to obtain a more pure form and dilute from there (it appears the latter from his post)?
And I wonder if others have tried those commercially available products and had success??

With a couple minutes of internet searching I found some pertinent scientific information that may be of value to people trying these techniques.

Unfortunately I find much of this literature outdated, the study here being from 1980 and initial findings on cannabis reported in 1923. But that does not mean what is said does not have merit. Review of literature I would say is in order as well as subsequent experimentation to confirm initial findings if what is proposed is true. I wonder as well if there have been further updates of these findings in more current literature that is not readily available..

There is/was debate in the scientific community as to whether sex will be fixed throughout the life of the plant or whether there are factors that can alter the sexual state during the life of a plant from one gametic form to another as opposed to being genetically fixed throughout.

In summary it would appear that there are certain environmental factors that can not only push species of plants toward a higher ratio of one sex over the other but may cause many plants to spontaneously change their sex from one to another during its lifetime, female to male or male to female, and cannabis is one such plant able to do this even with the latter scenario!

I would have further questions about the influences of sex determination in this fashion and the genetic story of sex determination in cannabis. This paper suggests to me sex in plants is not a matter that can be defined simply and in certain species is never truly "determined" and otherwise is a matter of certain genes expressed/selected for through environmental factors with some individuals/subspecies/species being more susceptible to environmental perturbations that can/would cause spontaneous sex reversal or have certain genes that will "over" express for one or the other (the "true" female/male that can never intersex). Or maybe I'm just baked.

The article is worth a thorough read.

Researchers further state that the ratio of gibberellins to cytokinins has a factor in determining sex (more gibberellin more males, more cytokinin more females), as well as levels of auxin, ethylene, and abscisic acid having a role in cannabis sex determination.

Environmental factors could push such hormone levels/rations in either direction, causing the plant to prefer growth of one sex over the other (Don't underwater those fems kiddies !!!).
This would suggest to me as well that there is also no such thing as a "true" cannabis female, only that such a female has genes selected to tolerate high amounts of stress that will generally not affect its hormone production to great extents causing intersexing.

The PDF article link with this information is below:

https://repository.unm.edu/dspace/bitstream/1928/2565/1/Oecologia1980(47).pdf

It was noted that most authors in their reports do not often say whether viable gametes were formed.

In terms of cannabis, the list would go as such, references not listed for brevity:

Abscisic acid: male to female
Auxin: male to female
Cytokinins: male to female
High Nitrogen: male to female
Carbon Monoxide male to female
Photoperiod (short day): male to female
Trauma (removal of leaves or flowers or crown pruning) male to female

High Boron female to male
Gibberellins female to male
Photoperiod long day female to male


I question exact methods, such as with trauma, how much and what was done, and others, like amounts of hormones used, or exact light amounts given. Going to the primary literature and finding the actual studies in question now will be a daunting and exciting task!

I feel with this information people can go and find the original articles in question (post them!!) read the methodology and try and repeat the results.
I say it can be done friends, it can be done. Do not stop the music!

I say it can be done friends, it can be done. Do not stop the music!

Click to expand...

I will hopefully be trying it out soon.... is anyone else ?

Kopite

its a wickid trick,,,,il defo be havin a go when im ready for males

Male clone to female

Male clone to female

1 ml per liter of water, sprayed 3 times, first time first day of flowering, second a week later, third a week later. Try not to spray all the leaves as it will kill them, just spray the areas where sexual traits will show.
Here is the male plant at just over 3 weeks flowering. It first started to make male flowers then they turned mostly female, over 90%.
I will see how good the flowers turn out.
-SamS

hay samS,,,,,amazing project you have here

,,,,,"90% sex change",,,,,,, will it be enough to make it smoke it like a normal bud ????

Sam_Skunkman said:

1 ml per liter of water, sprayed 3 times, first time first day of flowering, second a week later, third a week later. Try not to spray all the leaves as it will kill them, just spray the areas where sexual traits will show.
Here is the male plant at just over 3 weeks flowering. It first started to make male flowers then they turned mostly female, over 90%.
I will see how good the flowers turn out.
-SamS

Click to expand...

a noble experiment! very curious to see what these reversed flowers end looking like. i'm guessing from the picture that we're seeing skunk #1?

Sam,

Are the male flowers herming or are the flowers female from formation?

^^^goooooood Question

I bet if you applied 2 parts 6-Benzylaminopurine to 1 part Indole-3-butyric acid/Napthalenen acetic acid (to the roots, 15-30 mg/l) to the roots with your Ethephon/ABA, you'd get better results.


By the way, someone said there are no YY plants....I have had seed turn out to be all male. I only grew them to early flower, but no pistils were present. They were grown with another strain on the same schedule that showed normal sex ratios. Im pretty sure Cannabis spp. has a stack of hormone genes that determines the reletive populations of the sexes. The plants basically just tend to either be female, male, or hermie. So the statement is partially true, but I dont believe there are any XY plants either. It is yet to be determined however.

Bongstar420 said:

I bet if you applied 2 parts 6-Benzylaminopurine to 1 part Indole-3-butyric acid/Napthalenen acetic acid (to the roots, 15-30 mg/l) to the roots with your Ethephon/ABA, you'd get better results.

Click to expand...

Have you done this or are you just speculating? If you have done it then post the results, if you have not done it then why do think it would help? i thought they were for making roots?
Anyway I have zero problems with making males flower female, it is easy to do.

-SamS

By the way, someone said there are no YY plants....I have had seed turn out to be all male. I only grew them to early flower, but no pistils were present. They were grown with another strain on the same schedule that showed normal sex ratios. Im pretty sure Cannabis spp. has a stack of hormone genes that determines the reletive populations of the sexes. The plants basically just tend to either be female, male, or hermie. So the statement is partially true, but I dont believe there are any XY plants either. It is yet to be determined however.

Click to expand...

Out of interest did these come form a so called Backward hermie ? or a full on he/she rather than a female that showed male parts..

Kopite

Excellent read! Thanks Sam for all the info and I can't wait to read more.

Sam_Skunkman said:

Have you done this or are you just speculating? If you have done it then post the results, if you have not done it then why do think it would help? i thought they were for making roots?
Anyway I have zero problems with making males flower female, it is easy to do.

-SamS

Click to expand...

Mostly speculation.

I have not done this with a male clone. I ment in conjunction with the program that someone is already running for reverting male>female. BAP and Auxins will encourage female floral formation (1). Im pretty sure that ABA and Ethephon inhibit GA production, I.E. down regulate the gene(s) involved in GA production and/or bind to and neutralize GA. There could be more modes of action however. Increasing the reletive amounts of BAP and Auxins to GA should yield a similar sex response (2, this paper discusses general plant response) to ABA and Ethephon during early development of the plant flourettes. I would be willing to bet that regular applications of foliar Ethephon with root applications of BAP/IBA/ABA could generate a more robust pistilate floral formation on a male clone. I do not have space to do this because Oregon regulations dictate that a plant of 18"+ is mature and we can only have 6. I have read more papers then this, but they do not seem available at this time.

I have done similar things to increase my odds of getting a female plant when I have few plants. Watering the plant frequently with BAP and/or Auxins will generate a high likelyhood of female tendancies. Plus the BAP makes the plant really robust. Though, I did water with only BAP once and got 6/20 female, but I selected during prefloral formation. Threre would probablly of been quite a few plants that looked male in preflower then turned female later. I am in the process of growing seed from a plant that presexed male then turned female most likely from my heavy Auxin application to the roots. My theory is that there are strong and weak females as well as strong and weak males with a few hermaphrodites, I want the stong female plants because they will generate more female plants over time. The resulting progeny will tolerate lots of abuse from their growers and still produce banna free flowers.


1: http://www.springerlink.com/content/r112tp5q2h650188/
2: http://www.ias.ac.in/jarch/procb/95b/453-460.pdf

kopite said:

Out of interest did these come form a so called Backward hermie ? or a full on he/she rather than a female that showed male parts..

Kopite

Click to expand...

I do not know...These plants were not grown for much longer then just past presexing (small manclusters). They were supposed to be off of a female indica plant. The prior grower was an old hippie, so I do not think they had the most in depth understanding of the plant. Also, the bud was some of the worst tasting stuff I ever smoked. It was purportedly cultivated organically. I only wanted some strong indica genes to find some sleepy time herb in my crosses with my shark lines.

Why can't I see your picture,Sam?