Quote Originally Posted by stinkyattic
Well, I've grown a lot of different strains, and seen that plenty of times. It's really common... normal even.
For me, it has always happened after 12/12 is initiated... the # of blades starts to decrease, finally going down to a single blade coming out of the bud, as I'm sure you've noticed.
Another situation in which you will have something other than the normal 3 of leaves for the age of the plant is stress, which could be heat stress, cloning stress, etc. I call these 'stress leaves'... single blades that just appear like magic on a clone that is just rooted, as it tries to gather up as much light as possible without expending the energy to grow full 7-fingered leaves. Then when it is comfortable, you'll get 3 blades, then 5, just like a young seedling.
Another rare reason for single bladed leaves to appear is the polyploid condition caused by a failure at the RNA repair level, I believe. Check that out because I'm not sure... anyway it's nondisjunction of chromatids during meiosis, and you end up with a plant that has 3 sets of chromosomes instead of the normal 2. I think you can get this RARELY from cloning stress, but not sure of that either, anyway the plant may show ONLY single bladed leaves for its whole life! Weird... and no other problems! BTW this is why I get so snitty at people calling whorled phytolaxy 'polyploidy', grrr, let's not confuse things! Btu your hunch of clone off a clone scrambling genes is accurate.. . it's why you shoudl take great care not to stress your clones, because that's where you might have issues with DNA/RNA repair at the cut site.
Um okay I hope some of that sort of made sense... the long and short is, don't worry too much about it, but you need to get your temps down for SURE, unless you're running CO2 in a big way... more than just a yeast gen system.
If I was a dude, I'd have a boner right now. You are so fucking smart it slays me.