Like the seeds of their landrace ancestors, regular cannabis seeds produce both male and female plants. This is the way that nature designed it, and many growers and breeders prefer to work with regular seeds.
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Breeding
Regular seeds have the ability to produce both male and female plants, with a roughly 50-50 split. This is a desired trait for some growers who want to breed their own strains. This requires a certain amount of cultivation experience and time, but can lead to some truly unique and delicious cultivars, like Thin Mints or Chemdawg.
This can be difficult for new growers, however, as the male plants will need to be removed before they pollinate other flowers, or can even become hermaphrodites. This can be a tedious process that is best done in the pre-flowering stage, when it is easiest to tell which plant is a male.
The good news is that, on average, 1 in every 1000 seeds produced will be a male. This is significantly less than the 1 in 10 seeds that will be male when grown from feminized seeds. This can result in a higher overall yield for the grower.
Cloning
For growers who want to create new strains via breeding, cloning offers the benefit of working with exact genetic copies. However, clones require extra energy to root and can sometimes be difficult to tell apart from male plants.
Using regular seeds allows growers to skip the cloning process. Once a cannabis plant has reached the vegetative stage and you can see its gender, simply cut it down and root the cutting. This way, you can skip the waiting game and begin the flowering process immediately.
Theoretically, over a large sample size of seeds, you should end up with a 50/50 ratio of female and male plants. The actual percentage may vary slightly due to luck and environmental conditions. However, this makes the use of regular seed a good choice for growers who want to make their own hermaphrodites for breeding purposes. However, growers should still be sure to cull males as needed. Otherwise, they could pollinate your female plants and ruin the entire harvest.
Genetic Stability
Demonstration of the genetic stability of new traits introduced into plant genomes using genetic engineering approaches comprises a significant portion of the risk assessment required to obtain regulatory approvals that allow commercial product development. Different regulatory bodies require a variety of data points including sequence analysis of the inserted DNA (required in all geographies), protein expression stability (required only in a few) and inheritance pattern analysis (required in all regions).
Rapid environmental fluctuations during seed maturation/quiescence and storage may increase genotoxic stress, elevated recombination frequencies and mutational rates in seeds. The impact of these conditions on gene stability can be measured by the number of frameshift mutations detected in germinating seedlings. The number of blue sectors detected by Southern blot assays is also an indicator of genetic instability. Seed lots exposed to accelerated ageing showed a 3-fold increased incidence of blue sectors in clonal seedlings. These deterioration-related increases in mutational frequency can be reduced by storing seed under controlled conditions.
Phenotype Variation
Regular seeds are the seeds you’d find in nature and provide genetic stability and breeding potential. They can, however, be subject to hermaphroditism and require careful sexing to remove any male plants promptly. To minimize hermaphroditism, it is important to maintain a stable environment, avoid stress and contamination, and use a balanced nutrient regime.
QTL analyses for seed size and number per fruit identified eight QTL distributed across chromosomes 1 to 5 (Table 4). The largest QTL for seed weight explains 15% of the variance, while the two QTL for average seed number explain 9% and 8% of the variation, respectively.
The direction of allele effects at these QTL was nonrandom, suggesting that selection has acted on the trade-off between seed size and number. To identify candidate genes responsible for these QTL, we searched the genome for genes previously identified through mutant screens as affecting seed or ovule size in E. ulmoides and identified JAGGED LATERAL ORGANS, KLUH and BEL1 as possible candidates located within 250 kb of the largest seed size QTL.
