 Welcome to Breeder's Syndicate 2.0, where we explore the history of a clandestine scene. Researching everything from cannabis strain history, old smuggling tales from the first person perspective, to breeding science and news on current subculture. I'm your host Matthew, and I'll occasionally be joined by my homey not-so-dog, Breeder and grower from Mendocino, to speak on these subjects and sometimes interview other participants. Our goal is to document this history before it's written by corporations and others who just weren't there. Let's start writing some wrongs. Welcome to the Underground. Welcome to Breeder's Syndicate. I'm here with local botanist, our very good friend from the Breeder's Syndicate, and we have Thousandfold here to help me host this. Thousand, do you want to tell them what we're going to be talking about today? Yeah, welcome everybody. So last week we covered the technical aspects of the seed-making process, and as we promised, this episode is the first episode in a series on breeding. So, some disclaimers to start us off. Breeding is a huge and extremely complex topic. We are not authorities and cannot promise perfect information, and I'll do my best, and I'm sure the other two will do their best as well, to signpost clearly when we're uncertain, or when we just don't know. I'm going to lie. You're going to lie? Okay. Today's episode will be an overview on some of the science and theory behind breeding, and where it does and does not meet up with the practical reality. Again, because breeding is such a big and complex topic, we're going to try to draw a loose perimeter around it. A perimeter, I should say, around it, a line in the sand. So, we have a foundation to work from for the subsequent episodes. In the subsequent episodes, we, I think, will want to cover different historical or hypothetical breeding scenarios, and that will allow us to get more into the particularities nuances of breeding. Yeah, in terms of how today's show is going to be laid out, we're going to, first of all, cover the or gesture towards the Mendelian science behind breeding and some of its limits. We're then going to move on to an overview of breeding techniques and strategies and kind of give an isolated account of each with a little bit of context. And finally, we'll summarize with a section called What Makes Breeding So Hard? But yeah, without further ado, I wanted to dive into some of the science behind breeding, specifically the science drawn from Mendel's principles, so the Mendelian framework of breeding, because this is many, I think many of us have this as a reference point. Many of us have maybe picked this up at high school or, you know, it's pretty easy to pick up now if you haven't come across this before and I do recommend it. I'm not going to actually teach people what this is, but what I will say is that Mendel's principles of inheritance provide like a basic understanding of how traits are passed from parents to offspring and kind of laid the basis for modern breeding in the 20th century. So paired pretty closely with that is the Punnett square and some of you will be familiar with that. It's basically a little table that helps you predict potential outcomes of crosses between two individuals. It's like a visual representation of the possible combination of alleles and helps you determine like the genotypic and phenotypic ratios for the offspring. But again, trying to draw a line around that. Essentially, the tool is meant to help you predict, design and control your breeding project. Correct. And why I wanted to start with this is because I think there's actually quite a big disconnect between that idealized, simplified theory of breeding and the actual reality of breeding. I would agree. Yeah, I mean, before I kind of dive into some of the reasons why that is, I don't know, Matt, or local, did you want to say anything about, you know, your vibe with the Mendelian stuff in general? Not off of the top of my head. So with Mendel's stuff in general, that's like you said, it's usually the first place a lot of people encounter any kind of genetic learning, whether it's in high school or, you know, college intro level botany class or even biology, for that matter. It's an intro based on one-to-one pairing of a well. A lot of times that means very simple traits in an IBL. We can go more into that too, so people understand what that means. But basically, it's the idea behind it is a very uniform, predictable line crossed to another uniform, predictable line. And what will come from those pairings when there are very simple traits, be it parents with blue eyes, parents with brown eyes, very simple one-to-one trait breeding. I think that's a perfect place to start. And yeah, so like Matt said, the simple Mendelian framework, first of all, assumes that, well, not first of all, but generally assumes that traits are easily identifiable, easily measurable, and that each trait is controlled by a single gene. So there's like a one-to-one correspondence between the trait and gene for this model to kind of like be at its best. So we actually have our first question here as well, which I think is quite important. In the win asks, I really want to know what is meant by true breeding. I understand past traits, but what is the test to make sure that it's true? So I will say this, that in terms of science, a true breeding trait or plant means that it is homozygous for that trait. Or if you're talking about a pure line in general, you're saying that those plants are homozygous for most traits. Yes. Local, does that sound right to you? Yeah, that makes sense. And like I kind of am curious, from a practical point of view, if you don't have the science, how can you tell whether something a trait or a plant is true breeding? Only by observing the progeny. That's like the simple basic way. Should you want me to give examples on this? Sure. So like, example, live on it. It's a work to blueberry line. We knew that just from practical data from other people having grown it, that it typically in most rooms would express heavily blueberry terpene. With that said, we didn't know that it would necessarily breed true for those traits, meaning anything it's crossed to or whatever it's crossed to. We didn't know for sure if it would pass those berry traits consistently. So we were trying to see if it was true breeding for a single trait. So in those crosses, when we did them, most of the time, no matter what it was crossed to, the berry traits were dominant. Therefore, it's not totally true breeding, but it's more true breeding than most plant you'll find again. Yeah. Also add on that you kind of have to look for something to breed true for one trait. Like you can't assume that one plant is going to breed true for like six different traits. You know, in this, you have to kind of target a single trait. Yeah. That's a big thing to notice too in cannabis or to note. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. And I think that that takes me to our next point as well. You know, one of the other reasons why it's so difficult to apply Mendel's model like Matt already said is that we have a distinct lack of fixed or true breeding traits and true homozygosity in cannabis. Right. So there's another little narrative that comes out of Mendel's framework, which people love to refer to, which is the idea that you have to begin with two true breeding parents. You cross them to produce a true F1 hybrid with heterosis and hybrid bigger. Right. People have to spend this narrative. Well, you also have to say that if you're going to make a true F1 hybrid, it has to be two distinctly distinct and different genotypes. That's that's one of the other most important parts for a true F1 hybrid. It has to be two distinctly different genotypes. Sure. And then people also like to talk about the fact that, yeah, in a true F1 hybrid population, it's meant to be homogenous if you have two properly homozygous parents. Correct. But that doesn't happen in cannabis. I'll say that. Right. And second, secondly, the stage that's meant to follow that is the F2 stage. And according to Mendel's model, when you begin with two true breeding distinct parents, it's in the F2 generation. Where you're meant to see genotypic segregation. Correct. However, in our world, you couldn't see segregation probably at every generation. Correct. So this model doesn't work on that point. No. And it is interesting to me when I think about what you make of a pack of seeds that you bought that says F1, F2, because, you know, people make assumptions based on Mendel's framework. They sure do. What what those things actually mean. Okay. So in addition to that, that narrative of the true F1 hybrid going to F2 with segregation, some of the other reasons why we can't easily apply Mendel's framework. One, there's something called polygenic traits, i.e. these are single traits that could be controlled by multiple genes. And again, if you look at Mendel's framework, they're meant to be one to one correspondences. So that already adds a significant amount of complexity to your search for your experiment. The next one is genetic linkage. So you have genes that are kind of grouped linked within the same chromosome that further complicates your efforts to kind of like isolate correspondences. Yep. And there's something else called, I don't know if I'm saying this term right, Pliotropy. Pliotropy. Yeah, where it's one gene that actually affects multiple traits. So it's the it's the inverse of polygenic where polygenics one trait controlled by multiple genes. This is one gene affecting multiple traits. Yes. So I think they're even more. There's a really important one when it comes to cannabis called suppressor traits. And, and that's another version of the link trait. And suppressor traits instead of like a link trait being like if this trait is here in this plant and this trait is here in this plant, all of a sudden you see this, this trait that you hadn't seen before because it needs both factors to show it. So suppressor trait, it's the opposite needs both traits to suppress it. And all of a sudden this trait is gone, whereas like both parents may have something that you think is awesome. But for whatever reason, certain OLs or genes line up differently. And then once across that suppressor trait completely suppresses a specific trait. So that's also in there to a super important cannabis. It's been never used to refer to it as the ghost traits. Go ahead. Also add, I was reading earlier that there are, you know, obviously what we call dominant traits, but there are like additive traits, you know, kind of the opposite of your suppressor trait that you were talking about. Yep. So I guess, you know, here's an example since I can't really speak at, you know, at a strain level, you know, so say we have fish in the wild. There's this gene, a, you know, one that allows for it to have, you know, it blends in so it's not heavily predated. Right. And then there are these additive genes that are going to have to do with size. And so that fish can, if it has that dominant gene will be true for that, you know, less or amount of predation gene, but, you know, have variable variability in size due to those like additive, you know, type genes. It's still going to be true for that like anti predation gene, but you're going to have these other influences that are not really going to affect that dominant genes effect. Got you. Got you. Not sure if that, that really. Oh yeah. No, that's super cool. I think, you know, for me, this preparing for this episode has been really different from the other ones, because the other ones I could kind of like loosely sketch the structure off the top of my head, whereas this one, because I am an amateur, obviously, I actually have to do a bit of like personal investigation, you know, like actual some actual research. And so a lot of these, a lot of the points I just made are new things that I've learned. And it's, it's amazing to me, just how complex and wild the reality of breed, like, you know, sexual reproduction and all the complexities of the genetics are. So, yeah, I think I've used this example several times, and we probably won't get into at the genetics, because it's so little known about it. But yeah, but the example I that was kind of like a paradigm shift for me was learning that a male that smokes one single cigarette, right? And he smokes one single cigarette and will affect his progeny down four generations through epigenetics and that's like a scientific that's like in paper, papers now. So that that really blew my mind because if you think about the stressors that we put our cannabis through and the epigenetics and all that, like, you can imagine how far down. We are affecting progeny without even realizing what we're breathing. So I absolutely. Yeah, environmental factors. It's important for breeders to be competent growers for that reason. Yeah, environmental factors in general can't be covered by this model of heritability. It's it's precisely the one of the major things that's being excluded. Yeah. So I guess those are kind of the general points that I wanted to gesture towards. And it was mostly to name some of the many reasons why you cannot just say, hey, take that framework and I'll just slap it on because the science is a simplified idealized model. Yes, very idealized. It's not a one size fit all at all. So I think I was, I kind of want to conclude this section just by saying like, it doesn't mean that we have to throw all the signs out the window. They're obviously still really, really important principles that Mendels outlined that absolutely relate. And there's still many kind of techniques and strategies for breeding that come out of these principles that are still fundamental to modern breeding. Maybe the last thing I just wanted to also throw a mention at which we won't go into is of course there's there's much more modern science now beyond Mendel. We have marker assisted breeding and stuff like that. But that's going to be outside the scope of our talk today. Definitely. Since I don't do any marker assisted breeding, I could not talk confidently on that. Do we have people doing that in cannabis yet? Chimera. Do we know of? Chimera. We know he's done some great marker assisted breeding. Yeah, yeah. That's cool. Yeah, that's definitely beyond us for today. Yeah. Okay. So I did now want to segue into an overview of various breeding techniques and strategies. And I think to begin this section, the two really, really important questions that I think both of you could help expand on is, number one, what material are you actually starting with? And number two, what are your breeding goals? Yes. So do you want me to start like, you had, yeah, you had quite a bit. I think, you know, you and you and local and myself had a little discussion yesterday about this. And, you know, what do you think it takes to actually know what you are starting with? So this has been like the, the drum I've been beating as and probably, you know, like I get, I get a lot of comments about me being the strain police or genetic police or. You know, like the fun police when it comes to cannabis strains, why you take that so serious? Who cares? It's dank. Who cares? I just smoke it. But the problem is like for breeders, if you don't know what you're working with and you don't have a firm grip on the history, for example, you go buy your first pack of seeds or not even your first pack. You just go buy a pack of seeds from someone you don't really know that much about, but you've seen their stuff advertised in high time, right? So you take it home. You go make crosses with it and you find out five years later that this was actually bought from Spain and was a bulk purchase. And it's just some random, maybe OG Kush cross made in Spain that was relabeled to something else. So at this point, you've been selling seeds or passing out seeds with God knows what genetics listed as something. And now your name is tied to it. At that point, do you? What do you do? So all this data you've been bringing in like, okay, I'm seeing this in my head. This is what it is. I'm seeing this expression. It must be from this parent. I'm seeing this expression. It must be from this parent. And you start adding this data into your data bank and your brain and you start growing more strings. And now you're making more conclusions based off that first grow on what you grew because you're assuming that it was correct. So so many things happen from this. How do you properly sort through and get good starting material to work with? That is such a complex process. And it's really a personal journey. And it took me over a decade to really feel confident about who I was buying seeds from or who I was getting seeds from in the first place. And it really boiled down to knowing your breeder, asking your breeder questions, being very confident, learning myself about breeding and asking them hard questions about not even to say hard, but earnest questions about the process of making the seeds, where they source the cut. You know, sometimes talk to the person they source the cut from. This is all super important. And if you really, really want to do breeding breeding, starting material and being confident in your starting material is as important as anything else. And it's really hard to illustrate that until someone's further in the breeding career. And they have to go back and see how accurate their shit was. And almost no one can nail it in the first few rounds because of all the misinformation and cannabis and the smoke and mirrors and all that. So it's an overlooked, mega important part of the breeding process. And I can't tell you how many times people message like me or one of the other breeders. It'll be like, yeah, dude, I got my, you know, like X, Y, Z, some, some brand new guy that we know has never sourced anything correctly, crossed to DNA genetics, whatever, you know, like, and they want us to be jazzed about it with them. And like, at the same time, I know where those guys sourced their stuff. And I know there's no way what he thinks he has. Yes. So that's an impression he's now left on me that this person really didn't do their research from the beginning. And they're already making and selling seeds. So there's a lot to it. How your relationships form in this industry to learn from people and to be mentored can be affected by your choice and research ability. And what you start with and where you end up in the conclusions you draw from said data. Most importantly, in my opinion, is why it's so important to do that research initially. Yeah, because I mean, if you don't have a good starting point, it's going to affect all your downstream, you know, actions and results. There's there's several years of projects that I've done that I look back on even even like seven, eight, nine years into my career that I look back on now. And it's embarrassing because some of them were obviously so off from what I thought they would be as far as their part in history or what was actually in them. And then I go and use them because I think they're gay and I trust the breeder. But that doesn't always turn out correct. And there I can think of several examples where I look goofy as shit, you know, like, like looking back, I judge myself as being very goofy for not having done the proper research and taking so much more. So anything you want to add to that local. Yeah. So, I mean, obviously provenance is, you know, very, very important because, you know, we, we do have to, you know, take into consideration ethics. You know, like science, you know, obviously like one of the, you know, I guess some key points of it is to make sure you have ethical data, you know, if it's not, you know, is it really valid. Yes. But on top of that, I'll also add, you know, it this isn't something that you can just like dive right into and start reading from the get go. You have to learn your parent material like, you know what I mean, like it's not like you can just make a cross. I mean, you can but is that actually reading. Yeah, is that reading. Exactly. And it does take many cycles to learn a parent because it's not simply growing a dank, you know, while that is one aspect of it, you kind of want to see how it expresses in multiple different kinds of grows, because then you can kind of gauge what those progenies may express. You know, if it's leaning towards that parent, if that makes sense. You can make a much better educated guess that way. For sure. And educated guesses in in breeding, like in your first, the first pairing educated guesses are a lot of where we all start because just before seeing the progeny. That's what you have is educated theories or guesswork based on observations. I will add to that. I know we did breeding goals and and something else as an episode before, but I really felt like it kind of got confused between what I was talking about with breeding and what breeding is and and with. I think it was not so on that one saying that, you know, like breeding is just crossing two things and seeing what happens. I really firmly believe that breeding is goal oriented and only goal oriented and that making things to see what happens. Yes, that's a part of learning, but that is not a part necessarily of breeding, the actual breeding process proper. So I wanted to clarify that and I thought we could go much deeper into the actual breeding as opposed to just repeating the crossing. See what happens. Yeah, yeah. And I think the only other point I wanted to add or it's maybe a paraphrase of what both of you have said, but because there's a distinct lack of good information on provenance and history. Often you do have to treat your starting material like it's just a black box to begin. Right. And so where there is like local said, whether you're starting with parent material and you're needing to grow them out in in in various ways and various environments to kind of really see what they do. Because in it, or you're actually having to run out progeny to see the kinds of ratios you might get in the phenotypes to see if you can like. Almost backwards to juice. More information about the parents. That's really hard to do without the experience and I talked in other episodes about thousands of plants right. I talked about a lot about learning the baselines, be it Northern Lights, Skunk One, Hayes, different Africans like Swazi, Durban, things like that, the baselines and the reason I say that is for the people who want it backwards to juice. Like what possible parentage may be. Learning those baselines is one of the most important things in being able to do all that. And that's one thing Neville taught me early on, as well as James Hogg taught me the same thing. Learn the baselines. It's super important. If you want to be serious about breeding, know those lines. So I wanted to add that in too because there's no reason like when you're starting breeding, there's no reason not to learn those because they are so important. And they are the makeup of like 90% of what we have out there. Yeah, so I guess what we've really been addressing in the section so far is the information space and the kind of tactics that you need to employ to get as much information as possible. And I will, I will also add that like if people are having trouble doing the research, we do have our Patreon Discord for Breeder Syndicate. And that's like what we do 24-7 is talk about genetics, history, research, how to do this research, how to apply the research, all that stuff. So there are there are much better resources than the work one time. Instead of just saying like go do your research, we're actually trying to provide a platform for people to do their research. Absolutely. Thank you, thousand, because, you know, we have our codex we're working on with the strain base as well, because we want to provide a very accurate strain base that is not a wiki where everybody can add to it and add whatever goofiness they want. And and we're working on that and thousands put a lot of hours into into doing this I'm really stoked for everybody to check it out. Oh yeah, I'm super hyped about that. Yeah. Okay, well, coming back to where we are. We just talked a bit about how you know what material you're starting with and some allusion to breeding goals based on the knowledge that you have of what you're starting with. So I wanted to divide the rest of this section into two broad categories. Because sometimes your starting point is already a couple of individuals, perhaps that you're trying to who's traits you're trying to narrow down and lock in. Other times you might be starting with a pool of material in which you are wanting to perform a search, or maybe you're wanting to build that pool of variability in which to do the search. So I think I wanted to begin with that side where you are. I guess an analogy for this is that you're, you're widening, right? So there's widening and then there's narrowing and I think breeding is this interplay of like widening possibilities and narrowing possibilities. Absolutely. So in terms of the widening, I guess one characterization of it is like breeding to explore and preserve and expand variability. Okay. Is there anything you guys wanted to say just on that note of like breeding to widen to begin with? Are we still in the part where we just say little bits? Yeah. Okay. Well, the one thing I'll say is that cannabis itself, for the most part, is a very wide variable plant. And I mean, like a lot of people talk about, oh, that's just so bottlenecked and inbred. There are very few things I can reference in my brain that have been hardcore bottlenecked other than things like, you know, cookies has been shown to starting to be bottlenecked genetically. And that's why we're seeing like mostly one expression come out of all these, you know, different gelato crosses or gelato selves, I should say. But yeah, it's already a very variable gene pool. So a lot of people talk about bottlenecking and it's less of a concern overall than most people think as far as like, it might not be variable enough. Cannabis is pretty freaking variable. And most people are breeding with polyhygrids. So it's not as much of a concern as most people make it out to be. I agree. So I think this section for us is kind of more of an academic approach where we're just going to, you know, we'll kind of artificially or not just assume that for whatever reason, someone does want to increase variability. Okay. And if they did, you know, what are some of the techniques that they could employ? I mean, obviously you have something like the concept of open pollination, which is largely known as a conservation preservation technique. Would you guys see that as one of the techniques of actually increasing variability or not? Go ahead, local. Local had a good answer on this when we were talking about it. So open pollination, I feel like it's really only ideal, like as you were saying, 1000 kind of in a preservation conservation type of scenario. But I think cannabis is a crop that, you know, has to kind of be like directionally selected for at this point. You know, because if you keep open pollinating something, you're just going to lose traits, you know, by diluting that into, you know, instead of making it a one to 10 chance of finding this phenol, you might change that into like one to 200 or one to 100 or something. You know, yeah. So I think that's really one of the biggest drawbacks to open pollination. You know, an alternative could be like a quote unquote selective type open pollination where you you select a handful of males on the handful of females or all the females or whatever. Just because you're kind of weeding out anything that and again, this is all subjective and all personal because you're the person making selection. So, you know, obviously there's that pressure. So I mean, really at the end of it, it's just, you know, growing the progeny out because you won't know if you expanded that gene pool until you actually see what it spit out. Yeah. And again, you get back into the ability or maybe even accidental by selecting one trait you've removed the trait that you want, you know, like any. And this can be done in open pollination, you know, it could be you could actually screw it up by doing just a little bit of selection by, ah, you know, this one herms a little bit. Let's take that one out and leave the rest of these for the open pollination, but that one that herms maybe the one that had sculpt traits that you were looking for. You just yanked it because it hermed or didn't grow fast enough for you, you know. Um, yeah, this was a good one because you guys actually answered one of the questions we had, which is from E who did want to hear about, in his words, not a full OP but using multiple choice females and males as your base stock. So, so me and CSI discussed a lot of that when we were doing the Northern Lights reproduction. What do we leave in and what do we leave out? Do we want to take out some of the stuff that we are pretty sure isn't nice growing or maybe, you know, just different things that we were seeing in it. Like we were trying to figure out, do we even touch this? Do we put our imprints on it? And I think in the end we decided to go with not I think we in the end we decided to go with just not touching it because it wasn't ours. We felt like it wasn't ours to touch in the first place like that. And people wanted NL5 and a pure open pollination and at that point no one had done, you know, at least a 50 seed plus pop to make those. So we wanted instead of, you know, the 10 seed pop that was being sold, we wanted to do a nice 50 seed look through because that's what we had or we would have done more. Yeah. Yep. Very good example. Yeah. Was anything else to add to this idea of like open or maybe for like better term semi open pollination? Okay. Another good example might be skunk one. Skunk one was said to be skunky when it came out. And Sam the skunk man himself says he did not do anything but open successive open pollinations on skunk one. And most of us are familiar with skunk one now and what you're not going to find is skunkiness in skunk one. You'll find anything but that. He says he intentionally bred out the skunkiness, but if he's intentionally breeding it out through open pollinations where he's not selecting anything, I'm not sure how that was achieved intentionally. But it may be what locals talking about successive open pollinations accidentally removing a trait. I think that I assume also that that that approach probably sums up a lot of traditional, you know, cannabis plant breeding in various like indigenous cultures. Right. It's the kind of like semi open every year they choose the best and they chuck them all in for the next year. Yeah, it's mostly semi open. Correct. Okay. Okay. That's cool. I'll add is in kind of, you know, conservation population genetics, there's this term called the founder effect. And that is pretty much going to be, you know, the individuals and the frequency and distribution of alleles, you know, in that population. You know, those are the founding genetic, you know, material donors. So, you know, what you have and if that, you know, frequency for that certain trait isn't that common, then, you know, that specific fragment that you're working with, you may have possibly isolated, you know, that trait out. Yeah. Yeah. And I've always wondered if that happened with Hayes or, you know, like there's a lot of my wonder if that happens. Yeah. So, you know, this isn't this right here is more so this is an actual game of chance. You know what I mean. Oh, yeah. So that's one thing that to that specific type. Oh, yeah. You're going to predict what phenos the seeds going to throw out by looking at the seed. Yeah, right. Absolutely. Absolutely. This, you know, breeding is a game of odds. It's a game of like frequencies, statistical probabilities. Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. Well, the other point I want to move on to within this section of like exploring preserving expanding variability we have, of course, out crossing out breeding hybridization. Now, I was just curious, like on this one, I mean, there's not a lot to say about it. I think everyone understands what what this is. How often would you out cross just from the just from the get go? Like, under what circumstances would you just be like, I've started with this, but you know, I'm just going to immediately like cross it to something else. So a lot of the times when I like thinking back to my career, most of the times when I would be out crossing it was because I had a clone only selection and I didn't want to necessarily feminize it because that plant won't reverse well or for whatever you're doing, working on another reversal project. But I also like working with males a lot. I really do because I think there's it's, it is harder in a sense that the male isn't necessarily showing the visual traits. It's always going to breed, whereas females, they don't necessarily do that either, but you get a much better idea of their, their resin production, the kind of sense in that particular expression. You know what I mean? But with males, it is, it is tends to be more of an art form in what you do. I don't know. So I guess like one way I could look at what you just said is you can sometimes hybridize textually get more information, obviously, right? Like in the crosses, you will start to see like what's actually being passed. And like you said, if you got males, that's one of the only ways you can know what's being. And the other thing is obviously if one, one strain has one or a few or one desirable trait that you like in the another strain has other desirable traits you like and you want them both to be in a single strain. That's the other purpose for hybridization. That's the main purpose, I would say. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Local anything you want to add to that out crossing operating. Yeah. Yeah, so the hybridization part, I mean, it's, you know, if you kind of know like the parent material, you know, and you know, whatever you popped a few, and you can see it's relatively kind of, I guess this is obviously a hypothetical situation. But you see that it's rather IVL, you know, I don't think the smartest decision would be to, you know, breed it with itself again. That's obviously like kind of a case where you want to hybridize so that you don't lose some of that. Blueberry. Essentially. Exactly. Yeah. Really good point. Yep. Really nice points. Okay. I hadn't, I had a question here, which I wasn't very sure of. And I didn't, I didn't really understand how to approach it. So I'm going to, I'm going to let you guys have a go at it. But in terms of variability and having a pool to search through, are there techniques that allow you to dig into recessives more than otherwise? Yeah. Obviously, we're going to get recessives coming through, you know, it's cannabis we already mentioned, heterozygosity kind of pervasive. So it's not like you're not going to see recessives in any generation, but are there, have you all like experience actually looking for recessives? Did I just hear in New Zealanders say y'all? I do say y'all. That's beautiful. No, yeah, I mean. People here say use, otherwise. Sorry, God. Use? Oh, use, like use guys. Use guys, yeah. Yeah. S1s. S1s are the, one of my favorite places to see recessives and, and, and outliers like specifically selfing is one of the quickest ways to see outlier in my opinion. That's a funny thing about selfing, because on the one hand, you obviously it's a good tool for locking things in or narrowing. But on the other hand, I guess there's an element of it where you also will find weird stuff. It's double-edged sword. A lot of us refer to it as a double-edged sword because you're going to see high ceiling low floor in a lot of S1s. That's right. And we'll get, we'll come back to selfing again in the narrowing section. But yeah, local. Anything on recessives and like looking at like looking for recessive traits and stuff. I mean, I would just add on to the S1. I feel like it's the most effective way to actually lock in any sort of recessives. And, you know, one thing that I've seen, you know, rather recently, you know, for example, Bitter did the S1, F2 of the P91. And it's like that in itself, I feel, is like is isolating, you know, recessive traits or maybe not even recessive but desirable traits within a selective, selected phenome. Yeah. Oh yeah. And people are going to want to hear about that again, I think when we get to the locking in section. Okay. So I had a random one just to kind of tie this section up because I don't know much about it myself. I'm not even sure if it necessarily fits in here, but fuck it. We're going to ask it anyway. Yeah, try it. Cheese. Cheese wants to know about ploidy manipulations. Like the culture scene and like that's that I don't think that fits in any of these scenarios, people manipulating. Yeah, but ploidism with. Do you have anything there local? Yeah. So I was going to say, you know, really the only way we can fuck around with it is by, you know, treating it with, you know, harsh chemical. You know, harsh chemicals to induce that mutation. But I will say that it isn't uncommon for certain species to express, express different ploidy levels depending on like elevation or whatever, whatever it may be. So, you know, I don't want to say it does, but I also don't want to say it doesn't occur in cannabis, you know, and maybe. Are there. Are there ploidy isms that you can know if that's a correct word, but are there. Polyplots, can you identify them visually? Um, so I was actually reading a bit because I saw the specific question and I was like, okay, you know, I have worked with a PI that has studied like polyploidism in relation to like environment, you know, which she works in the Sonora desert. So it's going to obviously be elevation type based stuff. And there is some correlation, you know, things that are higher in elevation may have more chromosomes or less chromosomes depending. But can you, is there anything about ploidism that you can, like in cannabis that you can say, ah, that's a polyploid visually without being tested? Um, not 100%, but I was reading this paper and they were saying apparently that there are going to be less stomata and larger stomata per leaf area that makes. So you still need a micro system. Exactly. So it's not something you can like physically see like you kind of have to study it at the. I see that online a lot like on Instagram where people be like, check it out. I got a polyploid and like, let's show a plant that like has like, you know, weird branching or something like you got a polyploid. It's like, yeah, you see that with people who have like vacations as well. Yes. Yeah. It's like, no, those, those don't necessarily reduce to polyploidism. Yeah, that's not correlated to polyploidism. No. Yeah. Yeah. So polyploidism is specifically like a chromosomal thing, right? Like it's not, that's what it actually corresponds to. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's cool. And that was just kind of a fun one to chuck in there. I just wanted to correct that it's polyploidy, not polyploidy. I just remember. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Polyploidy. It's kind of an ugly word. It is anyway. I blame the word. The Latin or it's just, yeah. Anyway. Okay. So now we move on to what I think most people think of as breeding where you are trying. Well, that's not true. But anyway, breeding to narrow down and lock in. Yes. And I guess the easiest or most straightforward one to begin with maybe is like regular filial breeding. Right. So siblings have the same progeny lot generation intimated to produce new generations. This is where I guess you can kind of see like recurrent selections in successive generations. Yeah. Either of you like to kick us off on like just this, this method in general for trying to preserve something. Go ahead. Local. Lock something in, I should say. So obviously we're going to start with their seed pop, right? So this is something that's, you know, very goal oriented. You, you kind of have to have a goal to make things and move things forward. So, so you want to make sure that you have an idea where you want to go. And you want to make sure that you can identify these traits and move those traits forward by, you know, in this case, we're working with the regular population, you know, and this may be one way to do it, but it isn't an answer. And, you know, some people may look for male plants that do look, you know, morphologically similar to a female counterpart, you know, and maybe you'd cross those two together and hope that those progeny are going to be consistent for that morphological, you know, shape, but also those flower morphology traits, you know, because we do smoke the flower and we don't grow it specifically, you know, for shape. Yeah. But, you know, that's kind of one way you could maybe approach that or it maybe you can cross, you know, one narrow, one broad, you know, and see what comes out of that and try to find something in between, you know, it depends the goal really. And yeah, and that would be, you know, and that scenario, their goal would be something that looks quote unquote hybrid, that would be the goal, right? Like with that case. Yeah. For sure. I kind of did want to ask here because I don't know about this much myself, but what's the within filial breeding and generational kind of moving things forward? What is the difference between picking like one male and one female for each generation and picking like a few of each in each generation? And when would you kind of go with one as opposed to the other? Okay. So for me, I don't like to do multiple pairings and then mixing the seeds. I don't mind doing multiple pairings and keeping the seeds segregated. So I know what each parent is offering. But like in many situations when I see people doing like multiple females and multiple males, what they'll do is do the cross and then combine all the seeds and call it all one thing. And to me like that's fine. But I wouldn't do it because like each one of those different parents is going to be taking it in a slightly different direction with different traits. Combining it all together would be calling this, oh, this is that line. But I like in my case because I sell seeds. I like my customers to know what to expect. And in order to be very precise with that, to me, it should always be one-to-one pairings. But there are people who disagree with me on this. It really is just a philosophical kind of standpoint for a lot of breeders where they stand on that. Yeah. I think that's why it's such an interesting question because there's no right answer here. Absolutely. We're looking, I guess, at trade-offs. It's always trade-offs. I guess this is like the difference between like mass, I don't know what the right term is, mass or group selection, infillial breeding versus one-to-one. So let's say you're an average seed buyer, right? And you know, you're getting maybe one to two packs of something. Maybe that first pull, you're going to want to do a, you know, not an open pollination, but like some kind of selective open pollination so you can search through more if you genuinely have intentions of searching for something in that line. Yeah. So, you know, what was the question again? Fuck. I guess like the difference between one-to-one fillial breeding where you choose one male and one female and choosing multiple males and females per generation. Yeah. So when you want to open that pool up, that's when you'd maybe want to use a more broader pool of individuals, but kind of, you know, me after the F2, I feel like I would kind of just take it one direction or the other and nothing really in between because then like what's the point of searching through an F3, finding something, two things that are polar opposite and then keep crossing them. Okay. I have a further prompt here. Like what about the situation where you are choosing multiples, but you're choosing them for very similar traits? I just couldn't see the point. I would just take clones of one, you know, and just fill it through with clones of one as opposed to multiple. So this is kind of something that I find it's, I don't want to say it's relevant, but kind of relevant to my current situation is I'm growing the electric Boogaloo cross to the Appalachia. Appalachia, Appalachia, however we want to say it, right? What's the name of that line? Good Old Mountain Dew. Good Old Mountain Dew from High and Lonesome, that's right. But, you know, it's interesting because there seems to be three, you know, what we'll call frequencies, you know, things that are obviously very sativa, you know, things that are somewhat, you know, sativa, but didn't stretch as much as the things that were obviously very sativa. And then there are these plants that didn't stretch whatsoever. So now the way that I'm kind of looking at it is you kind of have these three types, but you have to find that individual within those types essentially, you know, kind of fulfill that purpose, you know. So it's, you know, selecting within isolated, you know, fragments within a group. I don't know. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, very interesting. No, that's super cool. That's a good anecdote there. Okay. Was there anything else that you two wanted to say about regular filial breeding? Otherwise... It just goes back to, again, knowing your starting material, if you're going to do filial breeding, like you want to know what you're working with and be sure of what you're working with because your filial breeding is a several-year, several-step long process. If you want to really, like, take it several generations in, you don't want to go spend five years on something and be disappointed because you found out it has, you know, craft the shitter in it, something like that, no strain. Yeah. Yeah. And later on, we will, I think, get to talk about situations in which you should stop or even go back. But... Good deal. For now, we're going to move on to a pet topic, which is self-filthing and using self-ing to narrow it down, lock in certain traits. Okay. I mean, when it comes to self-ing, there are several different methods. I think we talked about some of these last time in the last episode. Yeah. Did I? Yeah. Okay. In terms of techniques, yeah. Techniques, yeah. So you can use many of those techniques that we refer to, any one of them, you know, whatever works best for you. Some people have, you know, amazing luck with colloidal silver, I didn't. You know, that's usually the one most people go to because it sounds the easiest to make, but I highly recommend an STS phase. When you do reversals, most of the time you're going to be narrowing the pool much faster. Actually, all the time you're going to be narrowing the pool much faster in a self-ing situation than you would be by outcrossing. Obviously, you're bringing in an outcross, new genetic material. And even if it's a filial generation breeding of the same line, by self-ing, you're taking it down. It's like almost like a fast forward game genie type jumping through genetic, I don't know how you'd say that. Genetic segregation. Well, what's that? Genetic time. Yeah. Yeah. Jumping genetic time. Yeah. Genetic time machine. It's also much more predictable, right? Than filial grading. Yeah. Because it's targeted specific, like faster segregation. Isolation. And I think, yeah. And you know, going back to the, bringing back like the, what I was problematizing earlier with mental science, I think that's one of the reasons why self-ing is so big in cannabis, right? Because we don't, again, we don't have access to tree breeding parents a lot of the time. We don't have access to tree breeding traits most of the time. So self-ing is one of the ways you can kind of get around the lack of predictability there. I don't think that that is a reason that people make femme seeds. I think that is probably taken into account by maybe 1% of the people who make self-seeds, uniformity or what they're putting out. I think mostly that is, it's popular realistically because people like to save space and don't like males. And it's much easier for them not to look for males or learn how to select males. So that's, tends to be why most people make femme seeds is because it sells for that reason, not because isolating anything. Yep. Yep. That makes sense. But I guess like whether they know it or not, there is a distinct advantage from the other. Yes. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's cool. Local. Anything you want to say on just like self-ing in general, what are some of the aspects of locking in? Otherwise, we have quite a good question. Yeah. I mean, other than, you know, it gives you the ability to tap into certain, you know, recessives that might be desirable, you know, really that that is going to be the most effective way to achieve it because I guess if you're thinking about it, you know, at a molecular levels, you're kind of just stacking these things on top of each other, making the chance of something popping up significantly higher. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A good way of putting it. Okay. So we can move on to end the wind's question. And I think now I look at it, maybe split into two parts. First part is, have we seen many S3 like lines? No. Yeah. And why is that? Because once you start trying to reverse at the S2, there tends to be a lot of issues with reversals at S2 that we found in S2 populations. And I don't, we don't know why necessarily because we're not like looking at it at the molecular level. We're actually just looking at it from the visual expression level. I'm going, damn it. Why doesn't this work? But realistically, it kind of makes sense with the, as you dig into the recessives, more things are kind of scrambled. And, you know, like some things don't reverse well, some things do reverse well. And for some reason, the more you inbreed, the less likely things are looking to reverse well, at least with the lines we've done it with. Yeah. That makes sense. I mean, as you inbreed further, you are endangering essentially the fitness of the, the material, right? And the, and the offspring. Yeah. And if auto zones are controlling some of this, even though, you know, auto zones are the non-sexual chromosomes, even though they are not sexual, they might be helping control some of that. So there's a lot in, in selfing with the recessives and that is just, there's a lot of variability, a lot of things that could be controlling it. I don't personally understand. I'm not a scientist. And like I know we said at the beginning, but again, I am far from a scientist. I am very layman's terms. Whereas my, my buddy local here actually went to school, you know, like that's not me. So I may be using some odd words to people, apologies to the science community for destroying everything I'm saying. Yeah. Okay. Local, anything you want to add to that? Otherwise I can move on to the next part of the question. Um, so yeah, so Matt was saying that, you know, you're obviously, you know, stacking these genes on top of each other. Um, so, you know, it's kind of like fast forwarding in genetic time, you know, a few generations. So we know that this isn't at the extreme of an F2. This is, you know, something more and more isolated. And so as you isolate these things, more deleterious alleles have higher chances of popping up. And, you know, things, you know, not reversing past S2 could be just a symptom of inbreeding depression, you know, through rapid breathing. And like I said, it may be the, the things we were selecting as well, you know, to choose to do it. I mean, maybe if you took like, uh, let's say a super mega polyhybrid like animal men's, like if you go on seed finder, for example, and look at the tree, like it's like 90 feet long because it's just a bunch of polyhybrid stacked on each other. Maybe in that case, taking that to S2 might have a higher chance of reversals because just so many, you know, it's so overwhelming. You know, and obviously some of these, you know, depressions, you know, that we see aren't always going to be physical traits, you know. Exactly. One of crybabies big things are plant hormones and whatnot, you know, and that can, that obviously has so much to do with why the plant does pretty much all the shit it does. Like it not reversing might just mean that it doesn't have the genetic capability to these said levels of hormones or regulate, you know, that. Exactly. Cool. Very nice. Okay. So I'll reframe the next part of in the wins question, um, to say, uh, because as, as you mentioned that, we're not, we haven't really seen S3s, but have we seen many instances of S2s or S1s being crossed and what, what's the vibe there? Um, yeah. I know that me and CSI, like we found some of our best stuff in like a self sisters crossed to each other. So, um, let's say you pop a pack of, for example, California orange S1s. We would take one selection that we really like from California orange S1s and we find another selection that we really like for another reason from the California orange S1s. And when we cross those, we won't necessarily be getting what's called an S2 because it's not, it's not necessarily self, self would be using the same exact expression onto itself, but this is two different expressions from the same line. Me and CSI refer to this as an F2 reversal and it's not necessarily the proper terminology. It's not scientific terminology, but we needed something to denote like what we're doing and what stage we're at. And it's not necessarily self. It is technically a filial generation of sorts and it's a reversal and I like denoting reversals so people understand that something was reversed in the process so that they understand that it's more narrow as it were than using like, you know, other material out across. But in that sense, like we are, I can think of so many examples where we're crossing two sisters, two sisters from the same line in a filial generation just brings out amazingness. A great example would be bitter when he took my P91 S1s and found two selections he'd like for that and made the P91 F2R, I believe it's called. And it seriously was so much better than the original starting material. So much better than anything I saw in the S1s. And yeah, and it's not uncommon for that to happen in these feminized hybrids. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Oh, go ahead, man. No, I'll go either. Oh, I was just going to say that it, you know, it's pretty cool to kind of grow those lines out because it kind of like, how do I say this? It locks things in while opening things up in a way. Yeah. It sounds counterintuitive, but that's almost what it does because like the Sweet Pea, for example, like everything had copious amounts of resin. Yeah. You know, everything smells, you know, two kind of smells, I guess. Yeah, really. Yeah. Soapy and then one that was lean nutty, you know, exactly, literally. So at that point it was just picking a plant that vibed with you, really. Yeah. So I think those are really fun lines to hunt because you can kind of, how do I say this? I don't think personalize it is really the way to put it, but kind of adapt it to your environment. Yeah. Yeah. You know. And then there's also, you know, like the feminized hybrids where it's not sisters and it's two different clones crossing. And we've also found amazing stuff in there. I tend to like the sister to sister more than just the two different lines because that is more of a, let's see what happens type scenario. For the most part with the clone to clones, but I mean, like for that example, the reverse train wreck onto the Santa Cruz blue dream, I think that's become one of the favorites in our group. You know what I mean? Like, and this is, it was better than either parent, in my opinion, on their own combined it made for something better than both parents, which is not always common. Yep. And I guess to bring it back to the section on like narrowing and locking in, would you all say that selfing, and I don't know if I'm wrenching the science here, but would you all say that selfing gives us a better chance of actually having something that's true of breeding? Yes. Yeah. Generally speaking, yes. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Okay. And maybe the last question, last part of this question is, and you kind of alluded to this, when you cross two S1s, do you expect a little boost in vigor? Is that a way to offset some of this inbreeding depression? Yes. And I'll say just anecdotally, specifically with the P91 one, P91 was very, very, very, the reason it was given to me is because the dude who had it, the very last cut, he was like, this is dying on me in it. There was no vigor left in it. There was really no resin production left. It definitely restored vigor to an almost obsolete cut. So in that sense, yes. I mean, like the line, we have a vigorous line that represents P91 very well. Nice. Anything you want to add to that local? Not that I can think of. Okay. That's cool. Well, is there anything else we want to say about selfing in the context of locking in? Just that it's the most effective. For me, in my opinion, it's the most effective way of breeding to lock in traits. However, it can be done with melds as effectively. Sometimes it's a lot more luck or a lot more experiential knowledge, though. Yeah. Yeah. And while we haven't really been constraining this conversation to be about breeding at smaller scales, I think those of you who are interested in that, you can already see what the advantages are in using something like selfing. If you don't have that much time, space, numbers. When I did the most of my selfing work was when I was blowing up apartments, like multiple apartments because it was small spaces. Like obviously I could knock down walls in these apartments. So I couldn't join them together and make a bigger space out of it. So it was a lot of different small spaces with low electricity loads in those old-ass apartments. So I did a lot of selfing during those years and it was highly effective. Highly effective way of doing small space breeding. Nice. Nice. I think that will be a juicy morsel for a lot of people. Okay. I guess what I will add or is if you're a first-time breeder, it might not be the worst idea to start with that because it gives you an accurate measure of what you're actually working with. You have direct representation of something that may be expressed in the project. That's a good way of putting it. Something that may be expressed. May. Very nice. I love that. Okay. Now, we go into another, I wouldn't say a favorite topic, but maybe like a pet peeve more than anything. We have back-crossing. Now, I will say this. I think I can say that for whatever reason, there's a common misconception that back-crossing is just about locking stuff in. But in actuality, it's a little bit more, the context for it is a bit more complicated than that. Back-crossing in proper terms is you trying to incorporate a single trait, a single new trait into a recurrent parent that's already stable. That's the real function of back-crossing. Correct. And if we go back to the idea that the likelihood of you having a true breeding recurrent parent is already very low. Super low. It's already partly undermines this whole enterprise one. And two, the possibility of you having another true breeding parent that's true breeding for this one trait that you're trying to bring into the other parent is also extremely low. Yeah. So to me, we're kind of, I think that's why back-crossing as a concept in cannabis is so confused is because, one, people misunderstand what it actually is meant to do. And number two, people don't even have the correct starting conditions to do it. Correct. So that's how I wanted to introduce that. Is there anything you all would add to this? Because I know that there are lots of anecdotes about like people's myths about back-crossing in cannabis. Yeah. So one of the biggest examples given, or the most common used examples of back-crossing being massively successful is Cinderella 99. It was some of the first examples in cannabis of people saying, like, check out my work. This is BX1 and this is actually like 33% center, you know, princess. And this one is 75% princess. And this one's actually 99% princess. So since the genetics have been back-crossed this many times, of course, it's going to be 99% princess. You're always going to see princess. And in theory, that sounds great. In practicality, it did not work at all. C99 has many many phenos and expressions and traits and it's pretty broad. It's pretty broad. Now there are some that occur more regularly like the grapefruit, the pineapple but there's a lot more than that there. And to me, it was a fine example of how back-crossing is used incorrectly, understood, like totally misunderstood, like calling it like a 99% princess. That's not how cannabis works. Just like these simple crosses and no matter what you use, as long as you're just back-crossing, you're going to get 99% that's not how shit works. So most people throw that out as an example of how back-crossing was a-okay successful and to me it was like the opposite, like the perfect proof of why a perfect example of how misunderstood back-crossing is. Yeah. You know, I really don't think that there's a need to go really past the first back-cross really, you know, because again in a back-cross you should really know the starting material. So, you know, let's take blue bonnet for example, you know, it's something that's extremely stable and it's something that, you know, I would feel confident using it in a back-cross because like it just has visible traits that like, you know, you can link as we were kind of chatting about earlier. So it's like if that plant is stable, then in that first generation you should be able to find what you want, you know. If you're getting more than what you want, like do you even know what like genes you're targeting? Is there a goal in mind, you know, it's a little more complex than hitting the reoccurrent parent or whatever each time. And I'll add into, like in the theory of back-crossing we are trying, usually, usually like when I'm doing a back-cross, especially like blue bonnet, let's say blue bonnet BX1, right? I am trying to find an out-cross parent that is going to bring more stability to what I'm looking for. So I'm not necessarily in a BX1 going to go wild with the out-cross or go something like totally opposite. Unless the trait I'm looking for is something in that, and I know that's true reading too, and it could absolutely bring that trait over. If you take something completely different and bring it into your back-cross, it could go any number of ways, any number of ways, and you're not effectively back-crossing at that point, you know, just kind of playing. Yeah, yeah, and I'll kind of paraphrase this all differently, which is that often in cannabis, your individual plant that is, you want to use it as a recurrent parent, the individual plant that you want to use as the, like, I think they're called like intregressive parent, they're likely to be largely heterozygous. And if you are using heterozygous material, you're not going to get the predicted results based on the model of back-crossing. That's just, yeah, that's just how it works. Was there anything else you wanted to say about back-crossing? Have we seen many successful examples of it in the market in general? I would say, it's a good example of a BX1. I'm not going to say myself, but I can't, you know what, I'll say an example of let's see, a failed BX1 maybe? For my own. So with the Platinum Banana OGB BX1, I used a out-cross, it was a long time ago, and I hate even admitting this, it was an out-cross of Cookies and Cream Banana OG, and my goal was to keep it Banana OG dominant. And it looked good in some of the crosses, but what I found was that Cookies and Cream tended to dominate it, and it was the out-cross, but it was so dominant and so different that it really brought too much ability into what I was trying to do. So I feel like a lot of those while they were decent, and they made great lines, and there was Banana popping out a ton, it wasn't what I wanted from a BX1 line, so I consider it a failure. Yeah. Thank you for that. I figure it's easier to throw myself under the bus than other people. It's less like someone else. Yeah, because I think in many ways you could probably think of many back-crosses but not, you know, definitely not it. I can think about 30 at the top of my head. I'll keep myself. We won't go there. So we're getting close to the end of this section on an overview of various techniques for both widening and narrowing. Local, I don't know, at this point it doesn't really fit anywhere, but I wondered if you wanted to say anything about population-based widening, like as a concept and how it may or may not fit. So I'll start with Cannabis is, you know, we're really fortunate to be able to hold on to things in vegetative state for fucking ever, essentially. So that in itself kind of eliminates the need to that that that really defeats the need to damn, I lost my job. Yeah, nice one, Matt. Nice one, bro. More editing. Yeah, so since we since we do have the ability to keep things around for an indefinite amount of time, you know, in theory it doesn't really push us to study populations because we can just hold this thing on to you for the rest of our lives, you know, which is cool, we're very fortunate to have, but what happens in the instance that we lose these things? Yes. You know, I think there should kind of be a push for population type readings so that you can recover that thing lost, you know, and population type could obviously include S1 type reading. Yeah. Because at the end of it, your S1s are going to be a population, you know, a group. Can I just be basic here and kind of ask you to even just outline what population reading is? Yeah, so I mean that's just going to take into kind of consideration and to kind of like selection, you know, you have to weed things out to improve the population and move things forward, you know, that in agriculture I feel like a lot of the breeding has been forward and hasn't really focused on conserving things, but in moving things forward, there is progression but at the loss of you know, certain genes that maybe we can't recover anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Have we seen, so would you say that like, and maybe I'm just reiterating an earlier point that was already made, but would you say that most of traditional breeding in cannabis has been population breeding? Like, you know, pre-modern I guess um I mean, I couldn't really say because I really don't know kind of the whole anthropology of like old world cannabis and how it moves the world and I don't want to make stories up. Why? Yeah, okay. Yeah. Okay, well then this would just be a gesture towards this other kind of possibility. I think we won't go too deep into it, but it's an interesting point to make nonetheless. Okay, so we, I think for me this is kind of the end of this overview of breeding techniques and strategies and I wanted to move into this section on what makes breeding so high, but I think a good segue here is something that we've obviously talked implicitly about, but we haven't actually addressed it in and of itself, which is making selections obviously an integral part of breeding and yeah, I mean where do we even begin I want people to start I want people to start like maybe I shouldn't say I want people to start this is how I think of my plants in a breeding context. I think of each individual plant and I'm not talking about strains, I'm talking about each individual plant as a tool and each tool has a different set of traits, so when I go and plan a project I'm considering what traits I have available and I'm also considering where I would like to go and a lot of times I don't even necessarily consider what I have available, I think of something like cinnamon for example, just a single scent a single trait, I want cinnamon how can I come up with that with the tools I have available is it possible how many steps would it take things like that but mostly is it possible and if it's not, reassess my goals or find plants that I know will get me to the goal so I think of each plant like a tool in that sense or like a brush, a different brush you can use to paint a different picture it's a funny one because I see questions where people are like how do you select and it's like sure, we can give principles but this is really where it does become more about the art I think both of you alluded to earlier so much of it is about what you yourself want need what your environmental pressures are dictating for you what your starting material is already constraining you to so it's not, there isn't really a silver bullet for selection and there isn't really like a natural answer there is also one other thing that we haven't really discussed and that's the invariable intangibles the intangible traits of smoking effect smoking for effect this is a trait that is not just intangible meaning we can't you can't necessarily touch it, feel it observe it with all your most of your senses it's a sense, it's a whole different sense that we don't really normally tap into and it's individual it's not just individual per person it's individual per set and setting so you can have different effects from the same exact growth, the same exact strain the same exact bud in the same exact pipe and not finish the bowl it's a completely different effect from it at a different time in the day let's say you're really stressed versus when you were earlier that morning you were totally in a good mood blah blah blah smoking, everything's fine happy, chilling, you get home from work you're super stressed, you've got a lot of caffeine that day and you smoke and it's a completely different effect now you're getting more anxiety now you're getting more paranoia effect is the intangible it's one of the most, in my opinion different parts of breeding in cannabis and probably the hardest to quantify so I wanted to definitely bring that up at this point yeah, for sure and I think when we were talking yesterday in preparation for this you also mentioned like you wanted to talk about applying proper observation techniques and controlling variables and ensuring that everything that you observe is relative to stable observational conditions and I guess that's another key part of making selections is like how consistently are you growing these plants how consistent is your environment etc yeah, I touched on that earlier seed buyers don't usually take into account that I think is also very important and as a breeder I take this into account when I'm making seeds and how I sell them to them is where are your seeds being made or who are you breeding for who is your target audience that's more important who is your target audience is this seed you're going to be sharing with your friends or the seed you're making for yourself indoor seeds made indoor for indoor people is great seeds made indoor tend to do well for outdoor they tend to do well going outdoor however seeds made outdoor don't always do well like let's say I'm a breeder and I'm making all my seeds outdoor and my customers are 90% indoor that's where you're going to see a lot of problems with people saying man this stuff keeps herming it's completely different environments where they've been acclimated, completely different and that's a super important part to consider so who is your audience and again who is your audience, how serious are you going to take this if it's just for you and your friends are you going to worry about pollen contamination as much as you would if you're selling these seeds where people are paying good money for them and these are customers that you want to keep very happy or is it just your friends the target audience is another super important part when you're going through your breeding goals and who is my intended user end user of the seeds and I guess I'll point out something really obvious which is that your breeding goals will at least majorly dictate your selection and if they're not lined up then something's obviously wrong just to point out the obvious so just to zoom out a bit and just resituate what we're talking about right now this is kind of more of a summary section and kind of trying to situate some of the principles and techniques we've already outlined in a more practical sense and kind of address this question of what are all the complexities and nuances of breeding and so we've covered why we can't straightforwardly apply the science we've covered the difficulties in actually knowing your starting material and all your planets we've covered applying proper observation techniques and Matt just addressed the complexities in setting even goals for yourself when you're breeding I think one really big one that is worth talking about when it comes to difficulty is just how much time and how expensive this whole endeavor can be sure it's uh I talk about this a lot in other episodes but when it comes to reversals early on there wasn't a lot of us doing them in the United States and it was often called the few of us that were doing it you're taking the cheap route you're taking the easy route but realistically there's so much failure in reversals that it is very expensive and it takes a lot of time if you fail at a reversal and you don't have a backup and keeping backups is tricky because that's when you may encounter pollen contamination if you don't time it correctly or have it spaced out right it's a very expensive process whether you're doing male to female or feminized but I found it much much much more expensive and costly with feminization only because of the failure rate it's very easy not to fail as far as pollen taking in male to female breeding but in actually doing breeding when I'm also saying failure it's did you meet your goal and that's another part where it can get very expensive if you're very goal oriented and you have an end goal and you're sticking to it and you're working to that goal no matter what it takes time it takes money, it takes space space is important the more numbers you run the better the chance you are of finding something you'd like to use but yeah I think that's a really good distinction as well the kind of like mechanical failures and execution of the techniques or steps and then they're the failures to actually meet goals and those are actually quite so of course they're connected yeah so we had a question here about no so this is from Farmer Dan and I know we had an example he asked how do you know when to work a line and when to leave it alone like when do you stop go back instead of just pressing on and I think you two mentioned to me High and Lonesome with his Appalachia yeah and it's one of those things that like you know a lot of people talk about this but not a lot of people actually go back multiple generations and take the time or even make the observations like I've run enough of this stuff myself and I've decided this isn't a good representation of what I wanted to put out there I'm not going to release these I'm going to go ahead and go back to the F2 when I'm already at F5 so three generations take it back I'm going to go ahead and start back here the last time I saw a population I'm really happy with and I'm going to see if I can re-select this and there's so few times I've seen this and especially when someone's worked something up to F5 jump back to F2 work it back up in that direction but it's a trait of a real breeder it is an absolute trait of a real breeder to be that goal oriented and like I said it's not very common and that's one of the major reasons to do the hard work I think this is where it comes to your breeding philosophy, your ethics your professionalism all those things absolutely so for me we're coming to like an end of sorts this section was kind of just us zooming out and looking back and trying to summarize some of the difficulties in breeding and I guess I want to say here this isn't meant to discourage or demotivate people or dishearten people about breeding I think really for me anyway and kind of like producing this episode I think I just saw that there was a big gap in the discourse around breeding where people don't really talk about these gaps and complexities and nuances that often like if you're an amateur enthusiast like me and you google cannabis breeding all the stuff that you see that comes up in your top results are going to be like bullshit a lot of the time you're going to get like European C banks with their like the same blog post being copied over and over again and it's going to address just the most basic Mendelian stuff that we went over earlier for example so was there anything else in terms of like practical difficulties that you too want to add to this mix of like you know what makes this shit hard what makes it hard and in like this is a lot of the reason I kind of keep going back to the blue bonnet but it's one of those really really rare lines and it's been hard to explain this to people and I hope this episode helps illustrate it when you have a male that is true breeding for a trait that is a very desirable trait but also most representations of that line specifically are low potency low resin production or not super high resin production filled with oils and stuff and it came with so many other good traits that it also breached true for so not only does it breed true for blueberry it breeds true for a few other traits and that was the key to me I realized that it probably wasn't a pure blueberry line because it was vigorous it had a lot of traits that aren't even existing in blueberry and it breached true for those traits so it was heavily worked but it wasn't heavily worked in a direction that was so inbred that I'm seeing mutations everywhere in fact it was missing a lot of the mutations that commonly pop up in blueberry but it still had extreme blueberry turbs it's also why I have the hard time moving on from blue bonnet stuff because when you find something that true breeding I just don't know of any other tooling cannabis quite all I can and I haven't run into it as far as males go as far as for regular breeding goes and trying to explain to people what is so special about the work that Lone Star did is very hard because people just say it's just someone took blueberry and it's that I wasn't able to do it what he did in many years of trying running a lot of the progeny making the crosses I could never get it past just blueberry turbs without and I couldn't bring the potency and I couldn't bring any resin production with it even in out crosses so there's a lot of special stuff that can be done in cannabis there is a way to make true breeding strains it can be done but it takes a ton of work and that's not to again not to discourage anyone it's to encourage you to do more work it's to encourage you and say that this can be done and there is special stuff like that out there and I did try to make that tool available for everyone and left it in a nursery for anybody to use that mail because I felt like when you find something that special in cannabis if you sit on it you're kind of a prick it's a very special tool that everybody should be able to use and blueberry has very that scent for whatever reason has very medical applications that come along with it in my opinion and for a lot of people who smoke it whether it's anti-anxiety nerve pain relief pain relief period and so with those medical applications to sit on that would be super selfish so I tried but the nursery ended up giving it HPLV so it no longer exists but I do believe that people find stuff like that share it share it give it to the community it's that important breeding tools like that can open shift people's paradigms on what can be achieved and accomplished and I'm not even the best at what I do so I can imagine what something like that would do in something in someone super confident or someone super creative sounds you know someone that thinks much differently to me yeah and I you know I think it's good that you keep drawing our attention to the blue bonnet because it is exceptional and like we what like we mentioned like it is rare to find something that has you know relatively fixed rates that do pass and yeah that is yeah yeah and and I want to I want to restate again it's not flashing my buttons and like ragging about blue bonnet because it's not my work and I mean I've done work with it that line is not my work it was done by someone else named Lone Star from Texas resin company he's no longer with us and it's more to shine a spotlight on him and his work and his contributions in Canada yeah yeah yeah local was anything else you wanted to add on this kind of like summary of all the complexities of breeding and what makes it difficult at least on this general level yeah I guess I'll just say make sure that what you're hunting and wanting to breed with is something that you're genuinely excited about because you know as soon as you lose interest in something you kind of lose motivation and where to take it and to also understand that each plant is a tool like Matt was saying it's like me for example when I was doing seed pops it's like I was trying to find the thing that was most comparable to sweet pea but then you realize this isn't the way to hunt because like you know sweet peas it's own thing these other plants they're not related there's something different why am I looking for this and this when that's like not what it is yeah really really good point I think they're like quite a few different we haven't really dived into this too much we've implied a lot of it there are a lot of interesting psychological phenomena when it comes to breeding and things you have to overcome whether it's like the stress of knowing that you're doing these like big gambles whether it's about tension within yourself about what your goals are or what material you should be using I think there's so many interesting like side effects I think failure and the ability like the one thing I see the most that people have the most trouble with and it was what we talked about at the beginning was being really really honest with oneself about how you spent your money on your seeds what you have who made it and just because you've invested money into it doesn't mean it's what you want it to be confirmation bias is a huge some cost fallacy yeah totally okay if there's nothing else that you two want to add I did have a couple of community questions just to tie this bit off was it do it so someone who was an overnight sensation in the discord is no longer in the discord and we don't know whether they're like real or not asked what fundamental breeding skills deserve more attention than most people appreciate research research number one most people think that they are well researched because they have a high times magazine or because they back write a forum that you know is one of the few out of the many that were suggesting that they think might have the best data because it's old and that's not necessarily the case it might just have the most successful seed bank attached to it and that's why it's still around you know like even the most successful marketing SEO and that's why it's still around and survive the much better forums so research is just if you don't do it you never know where you're going to start and you're just so hard to say this but you're really in many senses when it comes to breeding you're just playing and giving yourself bad data points or not bad data points because every data point is a data point but maybe more no data points because you're going to have to toss them out at some point yeah how about you local I mean one research is obviously really important because you know not knowing what your baselines are kind of just you know voids everything out because you can't compare something you can't trace ancestry you know and no matter what phylo says exactly and that's another thing real quick I want to interject going to phylo is looking at their data is not research like this has been proven right and you know that has to do with the whole provenance thing but you know one thing that kind of like resonated with me between this community and like the science community is in quantitative genetics you know we kind of have a similar goal of like being able to tell what something is based off of growing generations not just like one plant but multiple generations parental you know f1 f2 you know in crosses all that because like the more information you have you know with these populations the more it tells you about what your starting material was but not only that it tells you what's behind your starting material because beyond a certain point like the story just ends and we don't know what happens before that sadly yeah so I guess ultimately you just want as much information as you can get however you can get it whether it's via provenance whether it's via progeny testing you want to maximize your information space before you begin good information because there's just so much bad information and in cannabis maximizing your information space isn't necessarily better it's maximizing your reliable information space which is the hardest part to get to and that goes back to the research yeah very good distinction okay well we're kind of coming to the end of this episode and just to remind people what the intention was here the intention was really to set the scene to set the tone of like where does the theory get us where does it not get us what are some of the practical complexities of breeding what are the trade-offs of some of the individual techniques what we have not addressed obviously is any specific scenarios for example there are going to be breeding scenarios where obviously you're going to need a combination of these techniques which is going to increase the complexity yet again and we haven't approached those things yet but I think our goal for the next few episodes I don't know how many there will be and I haven't decided on this but I'm assuming it's either to cover historical projects where there's a lot to learn from them or to cover hypothetical breeding projects where we can continue to tease out some of the nuances some of the possible approaches because I think as you all are gathering like there's so many possible permutations of techniques that you could use as well you don't just have to use one technique for your project at different points of your project you might need to use different tools right so I hope that we can get into the particularities and nuances in the subsequent episodes I think I think we will one of the number one questions I'm asked is can you cross a regular male to a feminized seed we've got plenty of room to cover those yeah we've got lots of cool questions like that and I think when it comes to setting the tone and we already, I don't apologize for this too much but we took this kind of really honest candid approach almost kind of like pessimistic approach just basically just trying to be real with people and trying to be as clear as we can be to the best of our knowledge on what you actually are going to face and I don't think there's any reason to be optimistic and skate over what are clearly going to be obstacles for people so I think that was the major intent of this episode and sending the foundation for future conversations and getting a little bit of a break is there anything else that like the two of you would like to add at this point go ahead and local, anything? I mean just do what's fun for you you know like you're the person making this election what are you excited about in selections you're seeing right now um I mean I've been really pumped about some of the Appalachia stuff and it's really kind of interesting you know having seen some of B's stuff with the Appalachia now that I'm kind of flowering out the good old Mountain Dew I think it's going to be really cool to kind of see you know what the difference in selection did you know are there going to be similar smell profiles because to me right now what I'm smelling in this you know in the good old Mountain Dew is not what I've smelled like in the Silver Mountain Hayes or the Yo Mama or any of that stuff it's a really different range of smell really so you know it's kind of cool to like slowly like kind of pick away at these like you know comparisons that you know are they're not like Apple to Apple but it's not like Apple to Orange you know you're seeing different parallels that's a better way to put it you know so I think that's really cool having seen you know some of PAX train wreck stuff in person like I thought that was really fucking dope because like Homie literally brought the entire line up I mean he did not really but you know most of what he had and it was really cool to kind of see how train wreck blended with some of these things and kind of also be able to see like that hey you know this thing so called dominance is a real thing because I saw it you know for sure can for sure be dominant over a lot of things but also it could blend beautifully there are few things that blended amazing with you know despite its dominance and so I think that's really one of the you know takeaways really is you're never really going to know until you see it or until you make the combination either like and you know yeah dominance we know it in theory like we know it's a thing but to be able to see it it's totally different yeah and I'm glad you mentioned some of the Homie's projects because I think in the subsequent episodes it's a perfect time to dig deeper into some of those stories because I think they're so rich every project is so rich like with learning that we could share with other people so I guess that's it I don't really have anything else to add other than you know like check out our discord patreon if you want to do research with us we're all there interacting a lot like even in the audio chat and this is what we live, eat, sleep breathe, drink this is a true passion for most of us like we talk about it here a lot but like this is all some of us do I want to add here too that like at the moment these episodes are kind of being co-ridden in a way by our community members so we're actually like building this alongside what everyone else is talking about their input is so important so important I mean I've been doing this a long time like trying to educate with what little I know but a lot with what other people have taught me you know this has helped a ton and I've learned a lot from them and they're helping me figure out what I haven't covered in the past and maybe things that like I wouldn't have even taken into account because I'm so busy like with my head in a specific part of breeding and I haven't even touched on a lot of the stuff that I should have touched on earlier like bringing it back so this has been amazing it's been a great experience and we will definitely get a chance to get to those points Matt in the future as well and so yeah again like if you're not part of the syndicate do join us you can always like jump in and contribute questions if you are part of the syndicate don't stop sending us your questions it's actually getting to the point now where I can't promise that I've actually seen every single question because that's how much volume we're getting now which is really really cool to see but I try my best you're doing fine alright well I think that's me really it's a wrap I think hold on I think we are missing one thing though let's see where is it where is it you think it is cut upon it that's us got gawk gawk dude per skirt from up north cut upon it there you go thank you everyone for showing up local thank you for being here in thousand thank you as always for keeping me on track and ADA keep bouncing everywhere it's been a pleasure alright thank you everyone chiming in chiming in all that and yeah see you next week on breeder sleep you want to sit at the table with the syndicate check out our patreon and our link tree or description below our merch site is officially live we have all sorts of shirts hoodies and goodies to sort you out and shipping is super fast and most importantly the quality is top notch I've been saving old designs for years for this purpose so please check it out syndicategear.com we also have an underground syndicate discord where we get together and solve old strain history together daily it's an amazing community of learning away from IG and it's an amazing resource for old catalogs and knowledge we hope you join our union of breeders and growers come check it out