Auto-flowering strains possess genetic traces of Cannabis ruderalis and flower regardless of day length. With auto-flowering strains multiple harvests can be achieved outdoors without artificially altering the length of daylight conditions. The Farmer’s Almanac is filled with good data for the outdoor gardener for determining dates, times, moon phases, and much more ! Since it varies by strain, growers can’t be sure of the exact threshold without experimenting under lights or from past observation outdoors, but 10 hours of darkness is a good starting place. If the threshold is 14 hours, that night length occurs on August 12th in Boston this year. Obviously, the plants had experienced their critical night length threshold well before this date. Realistically, most growers are thinking about harvesting some cultivars around that time, and most finish by late October in the north and late June for our mates south of the equator. If Cannabis plants required the 12 hours of darkness that indoor growers use to induce flowering, plants would not respond until the autumnal equinox, which takes place every year around September 22nd north of the equator and March 20th for southern latitudes. As a broad guideline, Cannabis indica landraces are found in northern latitudes, and Cannabis sativa is found in tropical latitudes closer to the equator. In general, the further north or south from the equator the parentage originates from, the shorter the night period will need to be to initiate the flowering process. The critical night length varies somewhat for different Cannabis strains. If the interruption occurs regularly, and the plant is already flowering, the plant will cease flowering and begin to grow vegetatively again. Exposure to bright light during the night cycle for a duration of time will interrupt the hormonal flowering response to darkness. This amount of time is called the critical night length. In simple terms that signifies that both Cannabis indica and sativa plants will not flower unless the period of darkness they are exposed to exceeds a certain amount of time. And three, it is cheaper to run only 12 hours of light than, say, 14 hours.Ĭannabis is an obligate photoperiodic plant. Two, all Cannabis plants will respond to this light cycle by flowering.
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Indoor growers use the 12 hours on and 12 hours off cycle for three main reasons. Sometimes it is nice to fool Mother Nature. Growers can do the same outdoors by blocking the sunlight for part of the day, allowing for more than one harvest during a normal growing season.
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To initiate flowering, indoor growers can simply set the timer to 12 hours on and 12 hours off. "This resource will undoubtedly improve our knowledge of the 'dark genome,' and promote the development of precision medicine.Fooling Mother Nature: reaping extra harvests outdoorsĬannabis responds to increasing night length by beginning to flower. "We have deposited GeneBridge and its seven billion data points on along with the already existing 300 million data points," says Auwerx. The toolkit was then used by the team to identify hundreds of thousands of novel functions of genes, many of which have been verified by Auwerx's group as well as by other research groups. They then used these to develop a toolkit termed "GeneBridge" that can identify potential gene functions. The researchers collected large-scale gene-expression datasets containing more than 300,000 samples from six different species. "We used this feature to predict the function of unknown genes by learning from those of the known ones." "Genes with similar functions tend to have similar expression patterns," explains first author Hao Li. In an article published in Genome Research, the scientists address the issue of the "dark genome" by developing novel approaches based on systems genetics. "Most of the research are gene-oriented and largely influenced by our prior knowledge, therefore many potentially important genes are ignored," says Johan Auwerx, whose lab at EPFL led the study, along with colleagues from University of Lausanne and University of Tennessee, and EPFL professors Kristina Schoonjans and Stephan Morgenthaler. However, most research efforts have been devoted to only a small part of the genes, neglecting the larger "dark genome." This impedes our understanding of the underlying mechanisms of complex traits and diseases, which is necessary for the advancement of precision medicine.
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Genes are the functional units of heredity, and the understanding of gene function is the major focus of biomedical research, serving as the basis of precision medicine.