Im sure theres a debate to be presented in there somewhere.Im just too stoned @nippie. Yeah,the more member documented stuff on this thread the better.I can always clean up banter in between the important info threads like i done other night:thumbsup:
^ This. I'm too lazy to go looking for it but I know we had a discussion in the days of yore about this and there was credible documented evidence of taking clones from clones over hundreds of cycles with no adverse effects. I do notice a reduction in vigor in clones vs plants from seeds mostly in the trunks. Plants from seed always seem to have a thicker and heavier base trunk than clones and more tappy (not a real word but I'm rolling with it) and thick root system. Of course clones have their own advantages. As for keeping a single mother for a number of years... all living things suffer genetic damage over time and you are going to pass that on to clones. This is probably minimized in most setups because there will be less exposure to UV but not eliminated. It is multiplied in a serious way if your mother has undergone stress like if you flowered and reverted or something like that.
I would second the thought of thicker stalks from seed, probably because they are babied more, I really don't know of science either way, just personal experience...never heard anyone mention that until now, but I have thought the same before But you have mutation over time no matter how you copy...it takes one error then there's no reversing that error. So does it really matter which way you copy? I would think if you had two clones from the same exact mom...cloned them however you wanted to perfectly every time, over the course of a few years both would show mutations from the original mom. Which are irreversible at that point
Point is you are not making a copy, you are cloning. Two different words with two different meanings. The closest example in the animal kingdom is cutting a worm in two. You didn't copy the worm and both living bits have the exact same DNA. Copying is mimicking something while cloning is making the exact same thing because it is the exact same thing.
I take clones and when I'm getting low, I choose a nice one for more clones. Depending on the cut, some aren't as healthy as others, but they're the same plant.
I'd like to disagree about the stalks. My stalks get pretty damn fat from clones. I'm sure it all depends on how long you veg. I'm usually at 4 weeks veg and in the end my stalks are at least the size of a D battery. And yeah, I agree, a clone is a clone. It's the EXACT same as the plant it came from. EXACT. Not a copy but the exact same thing. Nothing gets lost in the transfer. The same. Not a little bit "darker", not a little bit "lighter", not "wow, that almost looks identical". It is identical. The same. Not a copy. You will only get mutation in your clone if that mutation is in it's DNA. Not whether you fucked it up with nutes and shit. The clone, once rooted, won't be fucked up. You can screw a plant up big time, but your not changing it's DNA. Even if your grafting or pollen chucking, your only effecting the "offspring", not the original plants DNA. WHEW!!! I hope that does it.
Yes and no. Causing stress to a plant CAN result in mutations to its DNA. DNA is not a static thing that never changes. Especially in a plant. You can have different DNA in the cells of one branch vs another of the same plant. I'd yield the floor to Skunky if he chose one of these moments to pop in. This is what he does after all. Dude could probably splice a gene in that causes fluorescing buds if he wanted. In fact, I vote he does that and we make an exception on seed exchange!
What about cloning in flower? That's what I'm talking about. I recently lost a Chocolate Rain Pheno (1) because I waited to pull clones til about 2nd week of flower. Well the plant (2) never snapped out of it. You know how sometimes you do this, you get slight mutations (leaves)...but if you top it in veg it usually reverts back to mom's traits. IT had pistols all over it...literally all over it I cloned her again (3) and throw the plant (2) into flower. Well the thing sucked ass. Spit out tiny buds everywhere. I just throw plant (3) away because after topping twice, it was still spitting out pistols everywhere and I didn't want another plant (2) that was just tiny little fluffy buds instead of the big thick stinky buds plant 1 had. I'm sure a lot of you guys more a lot more about this than I do, but I never experienced this before....usually topping has always pulled the mutations out of clones pulled from flowering moms. But I usually always have thicker stems for same time vegging from seed. They are always shorter too. I have never vegged a clone for 10 weeks because the son of a bitch would be massive.....but I have done this many many times from seed. I guess I have never done a true side by side, but just personal observation. Like I said earlier, no science I can site, it may just be because I'm excited about a new strain and baby the hell out of them.
I can't say a whole lot about the behavior of reverting because I avoid it if possible. It causes a lot of stress to the plant and anything that causes stress can cause mutations. I've done different things at different points and gotten good results. The best results were obtained by taking the healthiest clone from a clone batch on a regular basis and using it as the new mother and sticking the previous mother in to flower. The hypothesis being that damage from taking cuts increased the chances of mutations at the cut points. A more cautious type would reserve the old mother until seeing how a batch of cuts taken from the new mother worked out in flowering. There is nothing that says a mutation has to be visible or take the form of twisted leaves or odd growth that would be obvious in veg or in a newer clone.
A paper related to stress induced mutations in plants. http://www.pnas.org/content/93/4/1449.full.pdf Here you can find a lot of papers related to things impacting plant DNA. They aren't generally about the fact that damage occurs because that is old news so they are studying relationships between the damage and other things in the plant. The most common are studies related to Heat, Oxidation, and UV induced mutations because these cause a lot of cellular damage and it is easy to induce them in a fairly uniform way to lots of test subject plants. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=plant+damage+causes+mutation&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C32&as_vis=1 One cool thing I found when searching on this is a couple articles and papers related to a plant phenomenon that may have a direct bearing on this discussion. It probably is no surprise that plants have stem cells in the growth tips and roots and that is why we are able to clone them at those points. But it turns out stem cells are far more resistant to mutations than other cells and actually commit suicide if they detect damage. That is quite cool and may be why in otherwise perfectly reliable methods you still have a clone die every now and then.
stalks have jack shizzle to do with it, seeds..jack squat....clones, squat Clone away with no ill effects...........Ive had this same thought myself, when i realized, it was MY own error in growing, not the plant It makes sense for a minute when yer high and think that it degenerates at some point but fact is.......IT DOES NOT, only your skills do One common move is to beat up the MOM or clone "host" a little bit and then you get a halfassed clone/plant in the long run, it'll do weird things.....grow oddly....branch strange, branches will be skinnier..........ALL because u beat-up the host/mom But if u can nurse her, host/mom, back to life then youll regain your past gems..... Been there, done that.....only to be proved wrong, it was just ME
nip- just fully veg the questionable cuts for a month or more. They'll snap out of it and you'll have a nice bushy mom. Here's the dealio on clones. They may all be the same genetic make-up, but, they are NOT the same plant. Every plant, just like every garden, is different. They get different light intensities, different amounts of water, differing root advancement, differing gardener error, differing pathogens carried in the grow medium. The same clones in the same garden get minute differences that can be enough to cause wildly differing growth rates, patterns and yields. It's our job to minimize these differences to create optimal uniform gardens. Often, we/I fail. In the same garden I can have a clone that underperforms every other sister clone because it stood in an area with less airflow and developed root rot. That plant will always under perform compared to the others no matter what I do. It's not the genetics or a mutation....it's simply gardener error bringing out a different aspect of the plant that is misinterpreted as genetic degeneration. If genetic degeneration were real....the cut of Dab Chris has, Useless has, Lvs has and I have would be an unrecognizable berry scented generic plant. It's been cloned and passed around hundreds (if not thousands) of times. Yet, if grown correctly, it still retains the qualities that make it a sought after plant in the first place.
These plants are tended by humans and RR is right. That is a MUCH bigger factor than genetic mutation in all of this. Mutation isn't caused by cloning itself (actually the information I mentioned before about stem cells in plants indicates that plants have special mechanisms to help assure the integrity of cells). But mutation definitely does happen and stressing your plants will increase the chance of it happening. It even happens without any outside stress just from simple copying error in cell replication. http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/dna-damage-repair-mechanisms-for-maintaining-dna-344 The truth is, most mutations won't impact the characteristics you care about in your plants. Those characteristics represent a tiny part of the plant genome so the probability of the right cells in the plant mutating in the right way to change them is pretty low. The probability of you doing something to screw up the plant... much much higher That said... I take new mothers from clones early and often to minimize the possibility of mutations impacting my genetics so that is what I'm going to pass on to others when they ask.
I have a question about genetics. I recently had some plants that were started from seed. I put them under 24x7 light for about two months. I found that they both flowered which makes me suspect that the seeds were autos. I did stress the shit out of them during the grow cycle, even had the t5 fall on them and burn the shit out of them, but they did recover nicely. I had several other strains in the same place, for the same amount of time and my ko kush also had the light fall on it and burn the shit out of it. I am thinking that my seeds were either autos, or their genetics were somehow predisposed to flower if they were not babied. My question is this...How can it not be a genetic issue if every other plant in the room went thru the same stuff and did not flower under 24x7 light? My gut tells me that the seeds were either autos or the genes were so sketchy that even the smallest amount of stress set them into flower.
@RR.....the clone (2) vegged for 6 weeks before I throw it into flower. I took a clone (3)from the "clone (2)" and put 2 into flower. It flowered out like shit, totally shit. Clone (3) was vegging for almost 7 weeks..topped a few times, and still never changed back. So it was like 3-4 months worth of veg between to the two and the pheno never pulled out of it. I said fuck and throw it in the garage....I'll see if it's still in there when I check on things tomorrow
MG- Now we're touching on true running females. Every plant has the coding for some level of hermaphroditic tendency. It's part of the plant's survival mechanism. Just like some plants within a strain show differing levels of color or bud formation, some also have a greater tendency to herm. In some Thai strains it's almost impossible to cull this trait. Good breeders stress parent plants to induce herming and cull the trait. Good growers selecting mom's should do the same. This gives true running females with little risk of environmental stress causing hermaphrodism. Unfortunately, some breeders do not (including some very reputable breeders) which gives us incidents like yours. Nip- Don't know what to tell ya. Had a few strains that fucked around like that and one doing it right now. The thing that seems consistent in my garden is the affected clones typically show slow root growth also. Time and treating the roots has been working for me.
They were autos (it could have been a recessive trait that expressed itself in your plant). Hermi is a side topic because you said they were under 24/7 the whole time. Unless they were just pre-flowers which doesn't count as auto. In normal (non-auto) MJ (male/female/OR hermi) the flowering hormone is degraded by light and by reducing the light period you allow it to build up in the plant to level that will induce flowering. So even a hermi doesn't flower under 24/7. The chances of you somehow mutating a plant into an auto accidentally range from damn near impossible to none so the trait would have already been in the seed. It is pretty hard to mutate out a desirable trait. Evolution experiments generally start with something that already exists to some degree in a large sample of the population and then select for it over dozens of generations. And again, Res is right. All plants are actually Hermi genetically, whether auto or not.
