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Is Mutant Weed on the Horizon?
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Have you ever eaten a wild strawberry? What about a banana with seeds in it? Chances are you haven’t, but if you have, you probably complained that these wild varieties of common market fruit were not sweet, loaded with seeds and very small in size. The same process used to make strawberries big or watermelons seedless can be done on cannabis, and some not-so-crazy breeders from Buddha Seeds have been experimenting with polyploidy in cannabis, with some potentially game changing results.
Most organisms are naturally diploid, meaning they have two sets of chromosomes, one from each parent. Sometimes random mutations happen that cause the number of chromosomes to double or triple. In animals, this is normally a bad thing, but plants are more tolerant to having multiple copies of chromosomes, and it can even be a beneficial trait. Many species of plants have naturally evolved to be polyploids, but not in the case of cannabis. According to CJ Schwartz from Marigene, a company that is in the process building a genetic database of different varieties of cannabis, all the cannabis he has seen so far is diploid.
The extra genetic material in polyploidy plants makes them bigger; with bigger seeds, leaves, stems and bigger flowers. Commercial farmers and breeders induce polyploidy for a variety of reasons, and a lot of the plants you eat every have many more than two sets of chromosomes. Polyploid crops ensure large yields of consistent, quality fruits, vegetables and grains. Even though inducing polyploidy in plants for the purposes of commercial cultivation is unnatural, it does not affect the actual genetic code of the plant, and regulatory agencies do not consider polyploid plants to begenetically modified organisms. In order for an organism to be fully GMO, you need to introduce foreign DNA into its genetic code, like when you insert fish genes into a tomato to make it frost tolerant.
Almost all cannabis plants are diploid, but what happens when you double the number of chromosomes to make it tetraploid? Buddha Seeds, a genetics company from Spain, tried just that. They used colchicine to induce polyploidy in freshly rooted cuttings and seeds. Colchicine interrupts cell division, or mitosis, in a certain way that makes diploid cells divide into tetraploid cells, instead of making more diploid cells like they normally do.
Source: http://truthisscary.com/2015/08/is-mutant-weed-on-the-horizon/
