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Sterile Cannabis Plants?

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First of all, I must admit that searching for information on sterile plants is hard and there is almost no scientific information on sterile or infertile cannabis. But I managed to find something and I think this is enough to educate anyone on what is this strange phenomenon and how can it help us.

If you know anything more about this strange sterile phenomenon then feel free to leave a comment!

What are sterile plants?

Sterile cannabis plants are female or male plants that can’t reproduce or in other words, females can’t create seeds and cannot be pollinated while the pollen on sterile males cannot pollinate any females or their pollen sacks just doesn’t create any pollen.

Why are they that way?

Sterile plants are that way because they have some sort of genetic anomaly. This genetic anomaly doesn’t produce pollen or produces pollen that is not in the right size or shape in male plants but produces short female pollen tubes or misshaped tubes in female flowers.

This genetic sterility can express itself through natural mutation or can also be induced chemically and is used for many different plant species in feminized seed and female-only plant production.

But what about cannabis? Are cannabis plants also sterile and how can this help us?

From the information I managed to find, there is no scientific research on male or female sterility but there are however some forum threads where people say they have sterile plants. And this should be true because cannabis is just like any other plant and if other plant species can become sterile then why can’t marijuana.

You now probably ask yourself how this sterility expresses itself and where does it come from. Well if a male plant would be sterile then in theory it either:

  • Should not produce any male flowers at all.

  • Should produce immature or misshaped pollen sacks.

  • should produce pollen that is in the wrong shape and is not viable.

If any of these three variations can actually be true then this male sterility can become a real deal-breaker for seedless gardens and sterile seeds as you could get infertile male plants that could not pollinate your precious females.

But if a female cannabis plant should become sterile it could have misshaped calyxes or no pollen tubes at all, but they can also have some anomaly that they can take in that male pollen but does not produce seeds. This female sterility would be a miracle for seedless crop production as no pollen could ever ruin your garden and even hermaphrodite plants would not damage your overall yield. As for the question where does these sterile plants come from, I found that there are natural mutations in plants but they are really rare but some growers have experimented with chemicals that create these sterile cannabis plants.

In the information I managed to pull up there were some guys saying that their females were not pollinated by male pollen even if other strains did get pollinated and this could be female sterility!

In another place I found a grower saying that his male pollen did not pollinate any female plants and that was strange to him because he applied the pollen directly over the female flowers so in this case, it could be that male plant infertility.

There was another forum thread where a grower told that he got seeds but none of them sprouted and this could have been attributed to immature seeds or maybe those seeds were in fact sterile like the terminator seeds that Monsanto wanted to use on other commercial crops.

After examining these few cases I can’t be completely sure whether some or all of them had some variation of these sterile cannabis plants/seeds. But this could be a major turning point for large seed breeders if they manage to find and perfect this technology as then we could have no chance of getting seeds in our garden and we could grow clean and beautiful buds.

On the other hand, if large-scale seed breeders would introduce these sterile seeds we would not be able to breed our own strains and if they would not supply regular seeds there would be no breeding at all!

Can there be sterile offspring from feminized seeds?

I found a lot of talk about feminized seeds and that they produce seeds that do not germinate or they themselves produce hermaphrodites that have pollen that is non-viable. I don’t know if this statement is true but from my own experience, I can say that feminized cannabis plants can be pollinated and can produce seeds so I don’t know where this information is coming from.

I have also found many forums posts where growers are saying they have bread feminized seeds and got viable beans so this myth is busted at least till someone provides some solid evidence of those sterile offspring.

Does tetraploid crossing produce sterile seeds?

This is the only way that I have found that allows us to produce sterile plants and it is the process that creates those terminator seeds.

Basically what you need to do is treat a normal cannabis plant with a chemical called “colchicine” that induces cells to give off twice as many chromosomes and leaves other cells with no chromosomes. These plants that have been treated with this chemical then grow much much stronger and bigger than regular diploid ones.

They are called Tetraploids because they have double the number of chromosomes and it is speculated that in the 70s and 80s growers were experimenting with these chemicals and that many of today’s commercial high yielding strains have these genetically modified parents in their lineage.

But what is interesting when talking about these sterile plants is that if this tetraploid cannabis plant is crossed with diploid (normal plant) it gives off an offspring that is a triploid and because it has an odd number of chromosomes it can’t produce offspring!

Because this method is so efficient it is used in commercial crops to create seedless fruits or infertile male plants and I think there could be a potential to use this technology in cannabis as well!

REVERSE from dutch masterDutch Master Reverse

This is a very interesting product that I found and it supposedly should kill off all the male pollen sacks on a hermaphrodite cannabis plant.

I read that it is no longer sold in the US because of some studies suggesting it could be harmful if ingested so I am not willing to use it on my plants but the fact that it doesn’t let male flowers to produce is another sign that there can be a sterile cannabis plant and we just need to do some more experimentation.

As you can see there are some methods that alter cannabis plant sex and could potentially produce sterile or infertile cannabis seeds and if someone figures it all out we could grow plants that would be 100% female and with the process of cloning you could potentially get a garden that does not produce hermaphrodites and if it does they would not have viable pollen.

The last thing that popped in my mind was that sterile seeds and autoflowers could also go hand in hand as today’s feminized autoflowering varieties are sometimes producing hermaphrodites that pollinate your garden but with this sterile plant technology this could be avoided but you would need to buy new seeds for every grow!

Here are the resources I used and there are also those forums that I mentioned so if you are interested check them out and leave a comment here about your findings!

 

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