Credits to virginharvester at rollitup \t\t\t \t\t\t\t- For the purpose of seedbanks, a hybrid is in general, a cross between any two unrelated seedlines. ANY HYBRID IS heterozygous and NOT TRUE BREEDING. F1 hybrid - is the first generation of a cross between any two unrelated seedlines in the creation of a hybrid. F1 hybrids can be uniform or variable depending on the P1 parent stock used. F2 hybrid - is the offspring of a cross between two F1 plants (Clarke). What Clarke and other sources don't make clear is do the two F1's need to be from the same parents? By convention they don't. As well, german geneticists often describe a backcross of an F1 back to a P1 parent as a F2 cross. - OK lets say we take blueberry and cross it with romulan (both relatively true breeding of their unique traits) to create the F1 hybrid romberry. Now lets cross the F1 romberry with a NL/Haze F1 hybrid. Some could say this is a F1 cross of romberry and NL/Haze. Others could argue that it is a F2 cross of two F1 hybrids. Gets confusing doesn't it? Now lets cross this Romberry/NL/Haze(RNH) with a Skunk#1/NL#5 F1 hybrid to create RNHSN. Now some would argue that RNHSN is an F1 hybrid between RNH and SK/NL seedlines. Others would call it an F2. - So what does this mean to the consumer? It means that a seed bank can call a cross whatever it wants until the industry adopts some standards. This is what this article will attempt to initiate. Clarke eludes to standardising these definitions but never really gets around to it. Fortunately other plant breeding communities have (Colangelli, Grossnickle&Russell, Watts, &Wright) and adopting their standards makes the most sense and offers the best protection to the seedbank consumer. Watts defines an F1 as the heterozygous offspring between two homozygous but unrelated seedlines. This makes sense and gives the F1 generation a unique combination of traits; uniform phenotype but not true breeding. This is important in the plant breeding world. This means that when a customer buys F1 seeds that they should expect uniform results. It also means that the breeder's work is protected from being duplicated by any other means than using the original P1 (true breeding parents). [There are exceptions to this by using techniques such as repeated backcrosses (cubing the clone)] F2 crosses are the offspring of crossing two F1 hybrids. This means that they will not be uniform nor will they breed true. However, F3, F4, F5, etc will also share these characteristics, so to simplify terminology for the seedbanks and seedbank merchants, they can all be classified as F2 seeds in general. -C