say i have 2 males that carry very nice traits that i would like to carry on and breed to a nice female.....note* not same traits but 2 different characteristics i'd like to breed to 1 female. can i use some of that gibberellic acid stuff or the likes to change the sex of a male into a female and breed it to the other male? i know thats how they get feminized seeds by breeding a female to itself, so would this work? anyone ever try it? or am i destined to frankenstein a plant myself to see if it will work oh and please, no opinions, if you dont know anymore than i do on this then your opinion isnt helping much asking for people who know or have tried it, thanx
guess i shouldve added.... would it make a super male by doing this and combining the potency characteristics into a single male
Correct me if im wrong but im pretty sure that fem seeds come from a female that is left so long it thinks it will die, so it spawns the seeds (if hasnt recived polen from a male) to make sure it has kids so to speak.
i've heard a few ways. one is what you said, another is changing the sex of a bud just before flowering starts to make it grow pods and then it pollenates the rest of the plant giving a plant withs seeds of only xx and no xy genes. because it bred herself. other ways too. toastybiz: can i get any kind of reasoning? ....i was hoping for a lil' more explanation than that
The only explanation I have is that you can't change a male into a female. As for femmed seeds, true that an unpollinated female can produce a stray seed at the end that should be genetically female, but that's not how breeders do it in quantity. They use GA and specific lighting schedules to cause specific budsites on a female plant to produce outwardly male pollen sacs. The pollen in these is all genetically female, and the breeders usually harvest it to pollinate a different female (letting the plant pollinate itself can be done but it's inbreeding so it weakens the genetic stock). Once that female pollinated with the feminized pollen gives seeds, you have femmed seeds. But they aren't necessarily stable (could hermie), so the breeders continue to work with the lines until the are stable enough to sell.
Actually, I do have an explanation... The female chromosome is XX and the male is XY. These genes split to make sex cells, each with only one strand of DNA, ready to stitch together with a strand from another plant to create a new genetic offspring. After the female cells split, each sex cell has an X chromosome strand because it was XX splitting. After the male cells split, however, one is X and one is Y. When the X from the male joins with either X from the female the result is XX a female seed. When the Y from the male joins with either X from the female the result is XY a male seed. Breeders can force a female to make feminized pollen because, if you can force it to create pollen at all it would have to be feminized, the plant has only X strands to make that pollen with. Even if you could force a male to display outwardly female flowers, half the pistils would be tied to a X strand and half would be tied to a Y strand, those are the genetics the male has to donate, so you still would end up with 50/50 seeds. You can't change all the Y strands into X strands, and you can't selectively kill only the Y strands.