The onset of flower! This is a critical time in the field for farmers, who are filled with both excitement and nervous trepidation. It is the time to be walking fields on the lookout for those rare (1/4000), but fully male phenotypes that can pollinate your crop and decimate returns.
As experienced cannabis farmers know, the threat of cross-pollination poses one of the most severe risks to a successful season. Having a crop pollinated is a severe hit for biomass farmers (loss of 50% of usable material and 30% reduction in average cannabinoid content) and catastrophic for anyone in the trimmed flower business (total loss). What if farmers never had to worry about pollination events again?
The team of scientists at Oregon CBD have made this dream a reality for 2021. Following in the footsteps of plant breeders in other crops (watermelon, banana, hops, grapes, citrus, etc.), we’re proud to introduce SEEDLESS cannabis varieties for 2021.
These Non-GMO triploid varieties are made possible through advanced ploidy screening.
Triploid benefits
• Infertile flowers
Your flowers will not be seeded by neighbors or by any rogue pollen generated on your farm
• Non-viable pollen
Any pollen that may escape your farm will NOT pollinate your neighbors
• Reduced costs
Hiring crews to rogue “males” is no longer necessary
• Increased yields
Over 100% in some cultivars
• Increased aromatic content and complexity
30%-50% increase in terpene content
• More efficient use of inputs
Increased copy number of key genes leads to hyper-efficient plants
• Fully compliant at day of harvest for total THC
Total THC fraction is cut in half over previous type III plants with THCVA in its place
• Rich in novel cannabinoids (CBDV, CBGV, and CBCV)
35%-65% of the total fraction are high value propyl cannabinoids
• Photoperiod sensitive and day neutral autoflower varieties
Allow for early season staggered harvests or September finishing times
• Attained through traditional breeding
Non-GMO Project verified and in the final states of organic certification from Oregon Tilth
How is this possible?
It’s all mathematics. In this case, 2n + 4n = 3n.Cannabis in the wild is almost exclusively a diploid (2n) species. In diploids, every plant receives one set of chromosomes from each parent. Though rare, spontaneous mutations can occur that result in a doubling of the diploid genomes and lead to tetraploid (4n) individuals even in controlled breeding populations.
Dr. Hsuan Chen and Brendan Rojas, research plant breeders at Oregon CBD, designed a series of experiments to treat diploid cannabis tissue with compounds known to inhibit cell division. The process approximates the tetraploid-inducing events that occur in nature at a very low rate, but does so (now, after many experiments) in a more consistent manner. Treated plants must be screened using a flow cytometer--a device that can measure the physical size of a plant genome--and compared to their diploid counterparts to detect the desired doubling of genome size. Success results in tetraploids: plants with four sets of homologous chromosomes (4n) and an identical doubled version of the mother. This screening process is repeated a number of times in subsequent generations of cuttings to prevent reversion to the diploid state.
Tetraploid cannabis plants have been described by two other research groups (Mansouri and Bagheri 2017 and Parsons et al. 2019) and their findings mirror ours; distinct morphological changes and increased nutrient consumption are apparent, but chemical composition (ratios and total amounts produced) is relatively unchanged--albeit with a marked increase in aromatic compounds. So far, evidence suggests that tetraploids offer little if any performance increase over diploids, with the exception of louder olfactory notes.
