https://www.instagram.com/reel/DCCjayYP2ht/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
Couldn’t have put it any better myself
YouTube copy
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LOL yes many phenotypes are ruined and popular strains are boring AF(looking at you blue dream and strawnana). At my previous employment, only strains with the highest yields for flower and concentrate were warranted to grow. I don’t know how many times the nursery came up with a super unique strain with an awesome flavor that was fantastic for live resin and yet was scrapped by management because “it takes too long to grow” or “doesn’t yield 27 tons per plant” or “takes too long to trim because it’s a larfy sativa”.
RIP Cherry pie, Ghost train haze, Samo 78, bubblegum kush, and blueberry yum yum. I’ll always remember you.
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- Time with old mothers or tissue culture reprogramming epigenetics and no Meiosis.
- Pesticides and commercial growing/harvest conditions.
- Renaming instead of acquiring strains.
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I can second this, the plants have been reduced to “biomass” in corpo-lingo. It seems all people care about in my state are TAC and yields. There was a time when the only thing that people wanted was Chocolate OG because it was 30%+ THC and it could be grown en masse. I’ll add my own lamentations to yours- I’ll miss Purple Punch and Seattle Soda.
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Lying about the genetics your selling. Either through ignorance or malice. It’s taken 5 years and 20 different cuts to find what I hope is the real blue cookie , will know by Xmas.
Since legalization-breeders growers who don’t smoke
Instagram looks took precedent over nose terps.
Last but not least tremendous terp profiles that thrives at 3k a pound wholesale do not have the yields capable to survive at a 1000 a lb.
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Goodhart’s Law states that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” In other words, when we use a measure to reward performance, we provide an incentive to manipulate the measure in order to receive the reward
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I think that landrace strains were not polymorphic as most strains are now. There is something to be said for landrace strains containing unknown/unstudied cannabinoids/combination of Terpenes, esters, flavonoids.
Picture an effect as a picture puzzle. Each piece needs to be put in its proper place and orientation for a full picture to be had, even though atomically it contains the same things of being looked at chemically. There’s something more to it that we don’t understand yet synergy wise.
Why is a temple ball made from heavy 1:1 CBD landrace going to get you more stoned than a 40% flower?
Plant tissue culture reprograms the epigenetics of the genome which results in different phenotypes than the source. It is reasonable to assume that all strains that undergo plant tissue culture become more similar to each other than to the strain they were derived from. Many businesses maintain their strains using tissue culture now, but what these nerds aren’t telling the business owners is that this technique changes the phenotypes the business owners are trying to preserve. This is why so many people complain that all weed tastes the same now. I’m not saying that tissue culture weed is bad weed, but it is a counter-productive practice and not necessary if the business owners would have enough seeds on hand to pop some every now and again. Nothing is better at properly reprogramming the genome and at the same time maintaining phenotypes (while producing a few new phenotypes in some individuals) than sexual reproduction/Meiosis. There are genetic programs that are only activated during Meiosis, and Meiosis creates a unique chromosome situation that only exists during Meiosis.
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Could also be related to HPLV infection…
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That is a very interesting post and I agree full heartedly. You said it better than me.
Not sure authors agree on your interpretation:
The epigenomic changes were similar between somatic and zygotic embryogenesis. Following the initial global wave of hypermethylation, rare decay events of maintenance methylation were observed, and the extent of the decay increased with time in culture. These losses in DNA methylation were accompanied by downregulation of genes encoding the RdDM machinery and transcriptome reprogramming reminiscent of transcriptomes during late-stage seed development. These results reveal a process for reinforcing already silenced regions to maintain genome integrity during somatic embryogenesis over the short term, which eventually decays at certain loci over longer time scales.
Haven’t gotten past the abstract yet…but the concept that the changes they see generally mimic zygotic embryogenesis seems important here.
Yep, tissue culture can & does lead to phenotype changes…and those changes are often going to be epigenetic.
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It is close and thats why tissue culture weed keeps a lot of the pheno and can still make high yield fire, but far from perfect so you end up with something different. It also lacks all the extensive epigenetic reprograming that occurs during Meiosis, so the systems activated are similar between somatic and zygotic are similar, but with a different starting material these systems end up with differences.
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Thank you.
After reading the rest of the paper and following the references for meiotic epigenome reinforcement, I have to agree that the profiles are similar but non-identical.
Seems like cryo preservation should be an integral part of any tissue culture based strain library…
Comparing notes then playing mix & match is clearly a great way to ensure information content develops rather than degrades over time.
Which is why sex (determination) has evolved multiple times.
Layering that with a germline specific “dot your I’s and cross your T’s (methylate/demethylate your CpG’s)” because: mistakes == bad, seems to be the way to go.
I’m not certain I agree with their conclusion that TE deregulation doesn’t contribute to somaclonal variation, but I also couldn’t access the supplemental data they use to conclude that (and I’m a TE guy at heart).
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Can anyone comment on if anyone is cryo storing tissue cultures currently?
I’ve been wondering this since tissue cultural had become more accessible.
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No mas fire. Stuck it all up my butthole.
Renaming is a major reason almost everything taste smells the same. Part of the reason in my opinion is large dispensaries that are over hyped like Planet 13 wont buy from cultivars unless they have at least (x) amount of strains, causing smaller operations to rename the strains in rooms/trays just to be able to make the sale.
Edit. It also don’t help when they tell you names that they want, this month they wanted strains with “food” and fruity names for concentrates they would buy
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- Everything being bred is either candy or gas, and most everything on the current market can be traced to the same 4-8 parents
- Hardly anything being bred for disease/pest resistance which if you know anything about cannabis is directly correlated to psychoactive effect (we’ll just irradiate it if there are any problems!!)
- The renaming problem & everything else people have mentioned
I haven’t smoked any flower in 1.5-2 years and legitimately get more satisfaction out of merely collecting landrace seeds lol.
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My family has been farmer’s market vendors since I was a little kid, so I’ve had the chance to see everything slowly go downhill. Peaches today are nothing like the old varieties my grandpa grew. Tomatoes are also a joke compared to what they used to be. Everything is bred for shelf life, so the fruit are hard as rocks and never ripen correctly. Even with crops like green beans, a variety will change over time. Yield and shelf life go up, flavor goes down.
I used to grow a hundred or so varieties of different heirloom tomatoes each year. Most people have no idea of the variety that exists within tomatoes, because all they have ever seen are the red baseballs at the grocery store, which are bred to look perfect, because that’s what consumers expect. A lot of my favorite tomato varieties are old Russian and former Soviet state varieties. Communism killed millions of people, but it did make some fine tomatoes, largely I think by removing consumer choice from the equation.
And that’s the shortcoming of capitalism. By giving consumers choices, they inevitably make bad ones, and catering to those poor choices becomes the most profitable path.
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