Creating Feminized Seeds - The Right Way

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THCPezDispenser

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The concept of feminized seeds fascinates me, as well as having many practical applications to be able to create them yourself. I personally am very sporatic as to when I can have a grow going, so having the ability to start a small grow whenever I want without having to plant seeds and sex multiple plants or without having to maintain a clone mother and yet still be self sufficent appeals to me.

Below is my mental consolidation of the information I have uncovered in regards to making feminized seeds correctly, and hopefully this outlines how the members here can try making them for themselves. To be clear, I am in the process of doing this, and the article I have put together below is not based on experience but rather research. A peer review from the group will hopefully find any flaws in my logic or statements I have made, but I feel the article I have put together is based on generally accepted principles. You be the judge :)

Background – Marijuana Reproduction

First, some background. Marijuana is what is known as a gonochorist reproducer, meaning it has two distinct sexes of individuals (both male and female), similar to humans. This is uncommon in the plant world, where most flowering organisms are predominately hermaphrodite, having both male and female reproductive structures on the same plant. A look at a typical daylily clearly illustrates this as the female pistil is surrounded by male pollen producing stamen.

In the world of marijuana cultivation hermaphrodites do exist. While not the natural state of the plant, a hermaphrodite (or “hermie” as they are colloquially known), is a marijuana plant that produces both male & female flowers. This is a very undesirable characteristic in the context of growing marijuana for the harvesting of THC as a hermie can ruin an entire crop of what would have been sensimilla female buds due to pollen distribution in the growing environment. The pollen will fertilize any female flowers that it lands on, thus dramatically reducing the THC contents of the bud as the female plant redirects its energy from producing sticky THC to catch pollen to seed production, which have no appreciable THC content.

The hermie genetic trait is thought to be a survival characteristic of marijuana. It is a reaction to poor growing conditions where a female plant “feels” that there is a poor chance of a natural fertilization of its buds by an external male. As a result, the plant will take the dramatic emergency measure of producing both male & female flowers in a last ditch effort to reproduce itself.

Biochemically, a marijuana plant carrying the gene for this behavior is able to invoke this survival reaction through internally elevating the levels of gibberellic acid being created by the plant. Gibberellic acid (also called Gibberellin) is a potent naturally occurring growth hormone that regulates various processes of plant development. In some plants (such as grapes) ellevated levels of gibberellic acid can cause an increase in the size of the fruiting structures. The effect on marijuana when levels are elevated is the creation of male flowers on an otherwise female plant.

How the Sex of a Seed is Determined Genetically

Plants are either male or female depending on the two-chromosome combination of the X and Y chromosomes. A male carries an X and a Y chromosome (“XY”), while a female carries two X chromosomes (“XX”). When pollenization of a female plant occurs, the seeds and how the sex characteristics are determined is based on a simple combination of the two sets of chromosomes:

Male
X Y
-----------
Female X | XX XY
X | XX XY

From this Mendel Square, you can see that there are 4 possible combinations of the chromosomes from the male and female plant that a seed can inherit, 2 being male (“XY”) and 2 being female (“XX”), representing a 50% chance a seed will be male or female. As a side note scientifically this suggests that strategies of producing more female plants from seeds by germinating and vegetating the plant under certain conditions to improve the female:male ratio are ineffective, as the seed’s sex is predetermined when it is created based on the chromosome distribution outlined above. However, there are known cases of plants being able to alter sex based on environmental conditions, but this is outside the scope of what I am covering here.

What is a Feminized Seed?

From what we have seen above, the definition of a feminized seed is a seed where the sex chromosome combination is guaranteed to be “XX”.

It is common in the marijuana seed industry to sell feminized seeds that are simply the result of a hermaphrodite self pollinating. Technically, this is a feminized seed because both “parents” are contributing “XX”, resulting in seeds that can only have an “XX” combination as the “Y” chromosome is not in the equation. Pollen of a hermie female still passes “XX”, pollen itself is only a chromosome distribution mechanism and will still pass the chromosomes of the plant on which it is produced. In the case of a true male where pollen is naturally produced this is “XY”, with a hermaphrodite female plant this is still “XX”. Hermie male flowers are a reaction to environmental stress, they do not represent a fundamental rewriting of the plants genetic characteristics.

If the plants resulting from a hermaphrodite-sired seed are not stressed, there is every probability that a healthy female plant will be produced. The mother created seeds without the contribution of a male, thus the male chromosomes are not present in the offspring. The drawback of this method is that the seeds created are also guaranteed to have the hermaphrodite trait passed, resulting in a risk of your garden being destroyed by hermie male flowers spreading pollen and destroying the potency of your crop. Sometimes this manifestation of male flowers is very slight – only a couple of male flowers hidden within predominantly female buds. However this is still enough pollen being produced in the environment to effectively destroy a harvest.

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So how do we do this right?

If you are serious about creating quality feminized seeds, not just any female plant should be used. Ideally, you want to start with a true female mother, who has been proven not to express the hermaphrodite trait under stressful conditions. This is a fairly time-intensive task, however the process itself is fairly simple.

To find a suitable mother, the candidate mother plants need to go through a “boot camp” to identify the ones who will not turn hermie under stress. While this step can technically be skipped, if the time and effort is taken to do this you can ensure that the seeds produced from your efforts are the very best females without the risk of losing a crop to a “raping” hermie.

Basically, the candidate plants are put under a controlled stress regime to identify plants with the hermaphrodite trait. This can be done with female candidates that have completed the vegative cycle and are ready to be flowered by using the following light schedule:

1) The lights are turned on 12/12 for 10 days
2) Lights are turned on 24 hours
3) 12/12 again for 5 days
4) Lights are turned on 24 hours
5) 12/12 again for a few weeks

At the end of this light cycle, plants need to be closely inspected to look for the presence of plants with both male and female flowers. These are then discarded. Any remaining females can be considered to not have the hermie trait, and are suitable for the next step.

Please note that this may take much iteration using a lot of female candidates to find a true female. It has been reported that Indica strains are less likely to have the hermaphrodite trait, as well as plants having a strong Afghani or Nepalese heritage, so starting with these genetics may be able to reduce the amount of time to find a true female. However this may also exclude your favorite strain so it's something to be aware of.

Once this candidate review process is completed, we now have our mother plant. We have proven through these tests that this plant is not able to produce male flowers through stress, so we need to be able to find another way to produce pollen from this plant. As mentioned earlier, gibberic acid will cause marijuana to create male flowers. We can take advantage of this by topically applying a gibberic acid solution to our mother and artificially causing her to produce male flowers.

Alcohol soluble 90% Gibberic Acid GA3 Powder is widely available. I have purchased it from eBay and it is fairly inexpensive at under $10 for a small packet. A concentration of 100 (one hundred) PPM (parts per million) is required for invoking marijuana to produce male flowers, so this part is where the math comes in.

1 gram of “pure” GA3 powder added to 1 liter of water will produce a concentration of 1000 (one thousand) PPM. Packs are typically sold in this size (a little more than a gram to account for the purity factor so you end up with 1 gram pure, ie 1.11g actual weight x 90% purity = 1g of GA3). Based on this, you will be able to calculate the amount of powder you need to use to create 100 (one hundred) PPM. Based on above, adding the full pack to 10L of water will give you the desired concentration. However, creating 10L of solution is not practical as the solution will only be viable about a week once mixed, and very little of the solution is needed for the actual process described below. So, you will need to pull out your math/chemistry skills to figure out and create the solution concentration you need as the packets come in varying weights and purities. In the end, you need a 100PPM solution to proceed.

To create male flowers, this solution is then sprayed on a branch of the mother every day for 10 days. This should chemically invoke the plant to produce male flowers, and the pollen can then be collected. Please note that all females are different, and the concentration noted above may not work for all plants, and a stronger concentration will be required. Some females will not react to the solution at all, so this also adds some complexity to the process.

Once you have successfully collected the pollen, you now have “XX” pollen that can be used to pollinate a female. If it is used on the mother itself, you will end up with seeds that are genetically very close to the mother, however different phenotypes can be passed to the seeds as not all genetic characteristics of a plant are expressed, and recessive genes may emerge in the resulting offspring. This can be good or bad, but in general the seeds will produce plants showing characteristics very close to the mother.

Regardless, this pollen can be used as you would normally use pollen to create any of the typical crosses, but ideally the target mother has also gone through the stress-test to ensure it does not have the hermaphrodite trait.

So that’s it! Hope you have enjoyed my little essay on the feminization process, and I hope you find it useful! I look forward to seeing some feminizing grow journals :cool:

Pez
 
so..GA3 solution sprayer and that light cycle to follow, and all that, gets me a feminized seeds?

and prevents plants turn to be males too?
 
papabeach1 said:
so..GA3 solution sprayer and that light cycle to follow, and all that, gets me a feminized seeds?

and prevents plants turn to be males too?

So the light cycle comes first, this is to weed out the hermies out of your candidates. Once you find one, then you apply the GA3 to create male flowers on that plant. With this pollen that is created, you can create proper feminized seeds by fertilizing some of the buds on the same female. The seeds produced will produce only female plants that will not hermie.
 
stress, hermie, gibberic acid...three things i NEVER want to use/see.
Your post has much more info than others but im sure ive read this topic 20 different times in different posts. As far as i know hermies are bad. stress=herm, herm=herm, G.acid=herm. IMO feminization is harming the plants genetics and will give you unstable herm seeds.
Why dont you just buy the femd seed when you need it? Or better yet grow like nature 1 Male - countless females
 
I'll probably regret responding to this, but I will.

canibanol cannonball said:
stress, hermie, gibberic acid...three things i NEVER want to use/see. ... "G.acid=herm.IMO feminization is harming the plants genetics and will give you unstable herm seeds."

So I agree with you on 2 of the 3 items. I haven't seen anywhere implying that gibberric acid "causes" hermies. If you have, I would love to read more about it. It creates male flowers, it doesn't alter genetics to introduce a hermie trait where it didn't exist before. That stressing process I mentioned is intended to identify and remove hermies from the genetic pool, not introduce them.

canibanol cannonball said:
Your post has much more info than others but im sure ive read this topic 20 different times in different posts.

Well thank you, that was my goal :)

canibanol cannonball said:
As far as i know hermies are bad. stress=herm, herm=herm,

Maybe I am misreading your response, but the negative connotation makes it sound like you think I am promoting hermies, which I was not. There was a detailed section on how to identify and get rid of them from your breeding stock through stress testing. Isn't this a good thing? I would argue a lot of people have hermies and don't even know it since the stress level is never reached to identify them because of the good care we have learned to provide to the plants.

canibanol cannonball said:
Why dont you just buy the femd seed when you need it? Or better yet grow like nature 1 Male - countless females

Because I am curious. Because I like to experiment. Because I don't believe in not speaking about subjects and exploring them because they are considered taboo when there may be value hidden under the bias. Because humans like to maipulate nature to it's benefit - White Widow is a creation of man, not nature :)
 
Great article! This boot camp seems like an excellent way to maintain a female only population. The only thing that makes me skeptical about this process is any hermaphrodites appearing. What would you say the percentage of a hermaphrodite appearing is per 1000?

Question; If you were to spray GA3 on a few branches and use that pollen on the same females but on unsprayed parts. Would the offspring's seeds be as vigourous and stable as female 1 pollinating female 2's offspring?
 
let me get this straight.... If I keep one male, and I will have countless of females? and all hermies will disappear?

I just want to figure how I did has lots of hermies long time ago...
whats best trick to stop them to grow hermies is to have only one male around?
 
papabeach1 said:
let me get this straight.... If I keep one male, and I will have countless of females? and all hermies will disappear?

I just want to figure how I did has lots of hermies long time ago...
whats best trick to stop them to grow hermies is to have only one male around?
:doh:...Nothing is so "cut 'n dried" as that. But at least you are not 'selectively' breeding for the hermie tendancy.
At least THC's post describes the selection process for 'selecting' the proper females for a "chemically" induced staminate flower production.
 
You should cross the XX pollen with a different decent candidate than it came from.. Recessive traits are statistically more likely to be counter-productive since evolution weeds out crappy dominant traits 3x as easily..
 
darksideofoz said:
The only thing that makes me skeptical about this process is any hermaphrodites appearing. What would you say the percentage of a hermaphrodite appearing is per 1000?

I'm not sure anyone can answer that. It really depends on the particular genetics you are working with. It could be buried in the genetic code and not expressed in a particular plant but passed on to future generations, but this would be the case with any type of breeding. By applying good artifical selection best practices, you would always remove any hermies in subsequent generations to improve the line. One thing I haven't found is if the hermie trait is dominant or recessive. If it is dominant, stressing it to find out it doesn't hermie should mean that any future generations of parents that do not have the hermie trait should mean it is removed from the line. Recessive would mean that when it is crossed with another plant that also has the recessive gene, some of the offspring would exibit this trait. Again, this is a general statement to all breeding, not just feminization.

darksideofoz said:
Question; If you were to spray GA3 on a few branches and use that pollen on the same females but on unsprayed parts. Would the offspring's seeds be as vigourous and stable as female 1 pollinating female 2's offspring?

Typically inbreeding is bad - it would always be a better choice to cross with a different mother than the one you took the pollen from, ideally one which has also been proven not to be a hermie, although a favorite clone mother would still be a better choice than the plant where where pollen came from.
 
slowmo77 said:
i've ruined whole crops with hermies, so i just find it safer to avoid any thing that might raise my odds of havin them. i like seeds just not in my bud.

So if you are making your own seeds, forgetting the feminization part, the stressing to find a good mother is a concept you can use as well. It shows you who the good mothers are. From what I have researched the only thing here I could see that would do something funky with the genetic line is crossing a plant with itself. It's not natural and not recommended. Other than that, I don't see anything here that would increase your chances of getting hermies more than any other breeding program. Someone mentioned the gibberellic acid may, but it is a natural hormone and marijuana is naturally wired to react to it. I don't believe it would fundamentally alter the genetics passed to the next generation. It is a hormone, not a mutagen. (As a side note, it appears that gibberellic acid can actually reverse the effects of environmental mutagens: hxxp://www.springerlink.com/content/v73m02516721026q/)
 
Thanks THC...great way to find stuff out is to read and then do..I am not at that stage to try and mess with femm seeds..i am expairamenting on breading for the first time..and have enjoyed your thread...have tried your product yet?...and was it successful? Thanks for shareing with us take care and be safe


420
 
I mentioned at the beginning this was research, not experience. I have the gibberrellic acid and will be giving it a try this go-round...I am starting with some Apollo 11's from Joey Seed, so I will probably do a natural cross first to get more seeds to work with.
 
Absolutely! Pull up a chair :) I am trying to find a better spot for my grow, I need a bit more space than I have so stay tuned...
 
One aspect of feminizing I've been pondering is if XX pollen is COMPLETELY viable, or whether its more prone to chromosome translocations or other abnormalities etc..
Translocations can arise from problems during cell division, and we are stressing these things to do something they really hadn't planned on doing in the first place..
Its pretty much accepted that there are things that you can do to yourself that will increase the probability of a man having an unhealthy baby..
Essentially a flawed copy of genetic code is the only explanation I can come up with to explain the undenialable prominence (however slight) to hermaphrodism that feminized seeds exhibit.. Like I said earlier, female1xfemale2 'should' create more invigorated seeds than an F1 back-cross, but I'd put money on the fact that more hermies arise from the more genetically diverse feminized batch..
 
born2killspam said:
Essentially a flawed copy of genetic code is the only explanation I can come up with to explain the undenialable prominence (however slight) to hermaphrodism that feminized seeds exhibit..

It seems that the prominence is due to poor feminization practices, namely using hermies to create feminized seeds. As I mentioned in the post, these are technically feminized seeds but they are also guaranteed to have the hermie trait...a lot of feminized seed companies do this because it is cheap and easy to do.

I don't want to discount what you said about introducing abnormalities - the best way to find out for sure will be to stress the offspring and see what percentage hermie.
 
Thanks THC..just subscribed...and pulled up my milk crate..looking forward to your results..and good luck on the better spot for your grow...take care and be safe
 

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