Breeding For Aromas

Magic

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i found this article and it tought me a few things i thought that i would share.

" To a cannabis smoker, nothing can beat the sensation of sniffing a freshly cracked bud. The nuances of cannabis aroma can seemingly go on forever. And more breeders than ever are trying to unlock magical smells. Techniques vary, but no matter the methods used in achieving amazing aromas, breeders should have a vision for what flavor they're looking for. Here's some of the many ways growers can learn to achieve scent success.

Breeding For A Single Smell Type

Let's say a novice breeder is given a cutting that smells just like oranges. Our breeder decides to share this orange smell with the world by making it available in seed form. He wants to make sure when people grow out the seeds the bud smells as much like the original cutting as possible. In this case, the best way to proceed would be to create an In-Bred Line or IBL.
To begin an IBL, the cutting is crossed to a male of the same strain, or failing that, hybridized once. Using the seeds created, the breeder then selects a male which smells like oranges and crosses it back to the original mom. This process is repeated until a high frequency of offspring smell like the mother. Keep in mind, breeding for any single trait can "bottleneck" the genetic diversity of cannabis.

Breeding For A Two Smell Combination

What if our breeder wants to add their other favorite smell, maybe mint, to the mix. The breeder would then take their favorite mint smelling female and create an IBL for her as outlined above. The next step is to find the best male and female from each strain. Using those four plants, the breeder crosses the male mint to the female orange, and the orange male to the mint female.
If our breeder is lucky, the project will end right there with one of the two parallel breeds yielding plants with a beautiful spectrum of orange/mint aromas. If our breeder isn't so lucky, both crosses will produce unintended smells and they will need to grow large numbers to find the right smell combination, which they could then use to create a new orange/mint IBL.

Breeding For Multiple Smell Types

Sometimes a breeder might want to preserve the genetic diversity of cannabis for future generations rather than focusing on their favorite. This is a complicated task that requires a different kind of breeding. A breeder should start with landrace varieties or just plain old school cuttings with complicated aromas. He should identify a single plant that produces many different types of smells. Let's say we find a female that has five smells: pepper, sweetness, fruit, mint and skunk.
Next we want to out-cross, rather than IBL or back-cross, to a male from a totally different strain. This male also has five smells: black licorice, nutmeg, grapes, hash and mango. The resulting offspring will have all sorts of smells, including ones not present in the parents. The trick is to make sure the offspring you use to breed the next generation have more smells per plant than the last generation. So any plant we use from the seeds produced need to exhibit at least six smells to be useful in future breeding. Continuing to up the number of smells will ensure that no genetic "bottlenecking" is occurring. Future cannabis enthusiasts will select their favorites from a large, rich palette, because of breeding like this.

Bonus: The Secret To Detecting Marijuana Scents The Scientific Way

Some people have noses like a bloodhound while other can't tell Pino Noir from grape juice. But there is a more scientific way to sniff out exactly what chemicals are in your herb. Using the internet and a vaporizer with very accurate temperature control, any breeder can accurately tell what terpenoids are present. Each terpenoid has a specific vaporization temperature. Say a grower has a strain which smells like "citrus," but no specific one like pineapple, lemon or orange. By slowly increasing temperature on the vaporizer and tasting or measuring how much smoke comes off, you'll be able to tell approximately how much of each smell your plant has."

http://bigbudsmag.com/grow/how/article/breeding-medical-marijuana-get-best-aromas-august-2012
 
Any reports of what crosses of different smells results in, if one of the aroma wins the day? I have mastelow's master kush smell that invades most of the smell of the offspring. on the upside, it doesnt smell from far away.

Master low x Big devil citrus is abit citrus, mostly masterlow

Master low x think different is rank man! the smell is like carrion lol! it's like a mouldy bowl of fruit salad after 2 weeks with rhum, it sticks to the curing box and i cant unstick it, like ectoplasm. it is carrion mixed with masterlow smell. abit stronger aroma and thc than masterlow.

hopefully nirvana sky x big devil citrus will give me citrus ones.

nirvana sky smells like indian mountain charras at 90 days when i rub a bud, very specific type of hash smell. and abit of citrus :! great!
 
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A guy that I work with was working in Germany two years ago trying to figure out some differences in flavors and smells in cultivated and wild raspberries. The difference finally got narrowed down to the difference between organic/wild and greenhouse cultivated techniques.
He knew that was was getting into the roots wasn't making the difference, just because roots will only take up what they need.

Eventually, the company he worked for found out that what was really influencing the smell was actually some non pathogenic bacteria that lived on the berries and the bushes... in a greenhouse and it's controlled environment, the bacteria weren't there as they were in the organic and wild samples, and neither were the taste and aromas.

Growers spray their raspberries with the bacteria now inside of greenhouses


We talked about these possibilities with cannabis, and the whole "organic tastes better" idea, what roots will/can take up and such bacteria. He said it would be ignorant to say that this same effect from bacteria wasn't responsible in some cases.

Just relating this to say that aroma might not be all genetic, and if you're going to use it as a breeding trait, you might want to try some pretty controlled environments to be sure that the aromas you're getting are due to the plant, and not from some helping bacteria.
 
That's interesting, but raspberries and cannabis to completly different worlds, like comparing grapes to bananas. Marijuana is a plant but its not like other plants I'm almost possitive that the bacteria you are refering to would have a different effect on other plants. And like you said its a common bacteria for berries and bushes so who's to say that is even present when growing marijuana? Not bashing you bro thanks for the info, I just hate when people grow other things(plants) and try to say the same applies to marijuana which the have little to no knowledge about. Raspberries only have so many tastes and smells, where is marijuana its almost endless, so your friends statement maybe true for cannabis that tastes and smells like raspberries but other than that I don't see how that to be true.
 
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Well, going by how people continue to extoll the virtues of organically (lots of bacteria) vs the lack of "flavor" in hydroponic marijuana (much less bacteria due to controlled environment), coupled with the knowledge that bacteria can influence aroma, should send a scientifically-minded (breeding is science-based, isn't it?) mind to at least consider it, rather than outright dismissing what is a very possible cause.

Then again, raspberry growers kept trying to breed raspberries for a better aroma, and probably dismissed any effect due to bacteria out of complete ignorance, until some real scientists started to look at it all.

I guess if you are going to be breeding for aroma in near-sterile controlled conditions (perhaps a clean room?), then you certainly don't have to consider the possible effects. But if you can put an outdoor-cultivated bud against an indoor bud, and notice a difference, despite identical soils, nutes, spectrum, etc., I'd say there are definitely other factors.... which is exactly what happened in the case of the raspberries.
 
Well, going by how people continue to extoll the virtues of organically (lots of bacteria) vs the lack of "flavor" in hydroponic marijuana (much less bacteria due to controlled environment), coupled with the knowledge that bacteria can influence aroma, should send a scientifically-minded (breeding is science-based, isn't it?) mind to at least consider it, rather than outright dismissing what is a very possible cause.

Then again, raspberry growers kept trying to breed raspberries for a better aroma, and probably dismissed any effect due to bacteria out of complete ignorance, until some real scientists started to look at it all.

I guess if you are going to be breeding for aroma in near-sterile controlled conditions (perhaps a clean room?), then you certainly don't have to consider the possible effects. But if you can put an outdoor-cultivated bud against an indoor bud, and notice a difference, despite identical soils, nutes, spectrum, etc., I'd say there are definitely other factors.... which is exactly what happened in the case of the raspberries.
that makes sense bro, i wasnt trying say you where wrong:pighug: only that i could not see how they could be compared.
 
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