Originally Posted by smallarmsfire

well you're onto something. i'm working from a pretty limited knowledge base as well , always always learning (or trying to!)

but imagine a few different mothers. consider that they all appear exactly the same.. if we assigned them a few desirables, lets say Taste, Smell, High.

If we look at how these traits appear on the chromosomes that are passed along to offspring, we would still find differences between these seemingly identical plants.


Each would carry a pair of alleles for each trait, ... they could be dominant (T) or recessive (t).

Mum1 looks like Tt, SS, Hh
Mum2 looks like Tt, Ss, Hh
Mum3 looks like TT, SS, HH

they all appear the same on the outside, because they each share the dominant Taste Smell and High traits that we are after.

Well.. only Mum3 is going to pass along consistent results to offspring. If you were attempting to cube from Mum1 or Mum2, thing probably wouldn't work out as planned.. and as you problem-solved, you'd find that even if you used the same male successive times, your progeny would show variation in your desired traits from the Mother plant, because she cannot breed true with heterozygous genes. Irregardless of how stable the males used were, you'd never see consistent results because of the variation in the makeup of the mother.

So breeders are essentially forced to flower out crops using different males to determine variation & then hopefully use a means of elimination to distinguish what traits the mother breeds true for, versus what is only represented in her based upon a single dominant gene that may be hard to match up in any future male stock.

Originally Posted by Geeno

^the world that i gotta pay bills in is the real one.

The moment I get a bill in my dreams, it's over. Im divorcing my brain.