Back in the early-90's I had a fairly large-scale perpetual SOG going on a weekly harvest cycle, with a pretty high demand for clones. At the time I was using a more-or-less random combination of mother plants (what I now call "low-cycle propagation") and "clones of clones" (what I call "high-cycle propagation"). I started noticing a set of symptoms occurring in some individuals. I remembered reading Ed Rosenthal and Jorge Cervantes discussing issues with high-cycle clones of clones, and decided to test it for myself.

I started a test batch of 50 seeds, from several unrelated crosses. Normally I keep the clones in veg and flower the donors for the first screening round, but this time I kept the donors in veg and flowered the clones. After the first round of flowering, I had narrowed the field down to several prospective keepers, with the original seed plants still in veg. From that point I propagated all cultivars using both low-cycle and high-cycle methods in parallel, for several years. All mothers, veg plants, and flowering plants were grown side-by-side in identical conditions.

I tracked the exact lineage of each clone on it's tag; for example L210-3-5-2-7 would indicate the 7th clone from the 2nd clone from the 5th clone from the 3rd clone off the original L210 plant, and L210-3-5-2-12 would be another clone from the same donor.

After continuing this for about 2 years I observed symptoms in all of the high cycle lines (roughly 20 cycles) that were not present in the low-cycle lines for the same plant. Symptoms were not the same in all individuals of the same line, but many were segregated along branches of the family tree, and therefore traceable back to a single individual.

Based on those results I concluded that there is something about high-cycling that is detrimental, and have used low-cycle propagation ever since, and recommend a low-cycle propagation approach to anyone who is interested in maintaining a clone for a long time.

Keep in mind that phenotype = genes + environment. Different environmental conditions produce differing phenotypes.

"Potency" (both total cannabinoid content and THC content) is definitely influenced by environment, so growing a clone of the same plant in conditions that are less favorable for cannabinoid production will produce less potent buds.

Yield, potency, bud structure, and aromatic qualities are all controlled by quantitative trait loci [and are all affected by environmental conditions, in varying degrees. Cultivars that are described as "easy to grow" produce more consistent phenotypes in a wider range of environmental conditions than cultivars that are regarded as more difficult to grow.

If your grow room has excellent environmental control then you can expect a high degree of uniformity among clones. If there is a lot of variability in environmental conditions, then you will get a lot of variability among different grows of the same clone.

Beyond environmental factors, the genes themselves change over time, through the process of somatic cell mutation, and this also affects phenotype.


Well Just some info GL420 :jointsmile::jointsmile::jointsmile: