Inbred Cannabis

What Does Inbred Cannabis Mean?

In cannabis cultivation, inbreeding is the act of crossing a group, family, or variety of plants with one another. This results in inbred cannabis plants; the crossings will have no additional genetic material from outside plant families or unrelated populations.

In addition to 'inbred cannabis', the resulting cannabis from inbreeding is considered an 'inbred line'. This is in contrast to hybrid lines.

Maximum Yield Explains Inbred Cannabis

There are different levels of inbred cannabis. The most severe form of inbred cannabis is the self-cross, in which only one individual's genetic material forms the basis of subsequent generations.

Otherwise known as selfing, once a self-cross of cannabis is produced, from here down there are fewer and fewer degrees of inbreeding, as the crossed pairs become less and less related.

Inbreeding leads to an increase in homozygous plants and an increase in variability between related inbred populations.

Inbred lines of cannabis are the strains that have been crossed back into themselves, or those strains that have been crossed with a very closely related strain.

Since the strain has been crossed with itself, the scope for genetic variation has narrowed, more so than what would be found in a common hybrid or a landrace variety.

Generally speaking, an inbred line is a breeder’s attempt at making a strain more homogeneous. For an inbred line, a breeder would stabilize the particular traits that had been highlighted to be valuable. These traits would then be selected over and over again to ensure that they are present in the future offspring.

In contrast to inbreeding, there is outbreeding. Outbreeding refers to the process of crossing or hybridizing plants with other plants that they bear only a distant relation to.

When a grower is outbreeding plants that reside outside of a plant variety, hybrid seed is produced.