Polyploids

I find the last line of that quite interesting. The plant created from the male flower was showing female flowers. I’m curious if it would be a stable female somehow, like not just going through a herm phase. I could see it happening if it was cultured with the haploid material from the male flower.

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Cannabis uses an xx/xy system. So the most parsimonious explanation is a doubled X haploid.

(Might just be haploid)

Having cultured whole flowers, and not having done (shown) any molecular or cyto-genetics, we just don’t know.

But chances are they got their totipotent cells from the pollen or one cell division up-stream

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Would it be possible to grow a mature haploid plant?

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Often. Not sure about cannabis. Probably. Parthenocarpy is a pretty common trick with plants. There are several routes.

My fav was throwing Maize pollen on Oats.

Most of the time you end up with doubled haploid oats. Because the oat spindles have no clue how to attach to the tiny maize chromosomes, so they get left behind at the plate.

Turns out it wasn’t the maize DNA that oats couldn’t fathom, it was the proteins that bound the spindles that it didn’t recognize. So if you could make it through a round or two of cell division, the maize chromosome could be stabilized as an extra in an otherwise doubled haploid oat genome.

I tried using this trick to launch maize transposons into the oat genome. Cause they’re such useful tools everybody should have one in their arsenal.

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Absolutely!

Genome duplication is huge thing in plants. Looks like the major trick in their bag if you count segmental duplications and transposon based gene family amplification as “duplication” (I do).

Even if all the spindles had been recognized in the oat x maize example above, the lack of homology based pairing would mean a free for all at the plate & the out come from that mess is often a new species. Starting as a doubled bi-haploid.

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Why are you opposed to progress?

Some people call GMO corn you can spray with roundup progress too.

Some people, I guess. I’d assume those folks work for Monsanto.

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Some people think that chucking gout medicine on weed is progress too.

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I think the recurring theme here is ‘some people’.

Do you honestly think inducing polyploidy in a plant has the same implications as making a plant glyphosate resistant?

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Triploids and tetraploids are attainable from simple selective breeding techniques, it’s just that theh are rare and the resulting plants can only be sustained by cloning techniques. They aren’t genetic monstrosities, polyploidy is the driving force for the development of new genes in plant species.

They are the result of a natural phenomenon called hybrid vigor. Just because someone found a way to reliably induce this genotype (probably not the correct word to describe this.) doesn’t put it on the same level as putting jellyfish DNA into a plant.

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Precisely placing that chunk of jellyfish DNA, having control of when and where it is expressed, because you understand all the cis and trans acting factors that contribute to that expression, and knowing the actual gene product go a long way towards mitigating that difference, but won’t save you from “novel antigen” type issues when expressed in edible tissue.

What if I suggested tagging the males with GFP so you could sex with uv light?

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fbd

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Your response was too cryptic im no biologist, help me understand half of that msg.

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Yeah sorry. I might try again.

“Trust me, I did my homework” is one translation.

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They may have made feminized pollen first.

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Nope.

Feminized seed is made by inducing anthers on genetically female plants.

The poster above shows anther culture from a genetically male plant.

Started as XY

Ended as X (haploid).
Or XX (doubled haploid).

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you got a specific half?

GFP is Green Fluorescent Protein, which is the “jelly fish DNA” folks often get bent out of shape when we move it around to make glow in the dark bunnies and shit.

if you want just the bunnies eyes to glow, or the ears, or the whole damn bunny, you have to have control over where the gene (DNA) is read/decoded & the gene product (usually protein) is made so it can do its job. if you only turn the gene on in the eyes, you get green fluorescent protein in the eyes. which will then glow under UV.

There are a couple of ways in which where/when a gene is turned on is accomplished. there are DNA sequences close by (before/after/inside) the “gene” that are known as cis acting elements. then there are the gene products that interact with those DNA sequences “attached” to the gene. the genes for those are usually located elsewhere in the genome, those genes/gene products are the trans-acting elements.

it also turns out that where in the genome you insert your favorite gene can have a huge influence on how/where/when it is turned on. there are good & bad neighborhoods as far as “will this get made if inserted here”. Then there is how the gene is inserted. Old skool was just to get it in there and hope. Even with vectors like agro-bacterium that have a system for inserting their DNA into that of a host, insertions tended to be in large tandem arrays, often with rearrangements. One had to sift through transformation events to find ones that looked to have gone in in a reasonably straight forward fashion.

as far as tagging male cannabis plants with GFP, its not a particularly useful strategy. one could hook up the cis elements from say Rubisco (arguably the worlds #1 gene product) to the GFP gene, and target the Y chromosome for the insertion.

what that would give you is a male parent that you could use for generating seed where all the male plants could be visualized with UV (glow green).

might be amusing, but not commercially viable by any stretch of the imagination.

although I guess being able to screen seedlings as soon as they were green might be useful for somebodies breeding program. @Seth?

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Why not BOTH

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That was what I was aiming for?

How did I do?!?

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