Lost my draft so here's take two, going to try and keep it shorter but it's a topic I care a lot about so that may not work out :)
Let me first say that I'm not saying they suffer from inbreed depression. I simply can't know that for sure without knowing what PCK looked like a bunch of generations ago, in the 90s under cannabiogen. I think it has more or at least also to do with it being a pure kush. If they were heavily inbred properly I should not have 4 colors in 4 females (unless of course the mixed seeds in the pack, totally plausible).
Second, I really like what Ace adds to the scene but I don't entirely agree with their methods when it comes to pck, OT haze and a few others.
Inbreeding depression applies specifically to a population. An individual plant in such a population can indirectly suffer, effectively, from having deleterious genes without good genes to counter their effect. The higher the frequency of such genes (which can be in heterozygous pairs too) in the population, the more depressed it is, the less chances it has of producing a healthy vigorous population.
An effective way to get inbreeding depression is genetic drift. Which happens when a large portion of a population is wiped out or not allowed to reproduce (or never grown). The most extreme example is selfing, and the second is using only two plants.
Inbreeding depression is not just an automatic result of aiming for homozygosity, and two lines suffering from inbreed depression don't by default make a F1 hybrid with the vigor you can normally get. Hybrid vigor is much more than fixing inbreed depression. To fix it, bring back some vigor, the parents need to have the good copies of each other's deleterious genes. For heterosis, actualy hybrid vigor, their genetics both need to be good and compliment each other and above all be different.
Heterosis / hybrid vigor is primarily the result of combining different genetics. It's good practice to go for homozygous parents for the sake of uniformity but going for real F1 hybrids based on homozygous parents is really no excuse for using plants that have deleterious genes bred in, what inbreed depression comes down to for plants. That's the whole challenge of IBLing, which imo they should leave up to breeders buying it. Going towards inbreeding depression is to a point inevitable when working with small populations but to a point where they would severely suffer from it is not necessary and does not imply better for hybrids.
A common way, still, to prevent it is to introduce a parent from an older generation. For some crop (forgot the name) in Mexico they add a few plants of the old wild variety to the population.
Another way to prevent inbreed depression is the method I like to promote, backcrossing. I had a long discussion with Tom Hill about that at icmag (everyone a pollen chucker thread). His replies are gone but that's no loss.
Most livestock and crops we grow and eat are indeed hybrids. When the hybrid needs an update (e.g. for certain resistance or other desirable trait) an IBL parent is updated by backcrossing the desired trait into the IBL. This is done with population backcrossing.
Same with selfing to create IBLs. A population is selfed (each individual with itself) which leads to many different homozygous lines, some heavily depressed, others not. Of course the latter selected to be used for hybrids.
Anyway, I'm also not saying I mind. That is because I got them for breeding and sort of knew what I was getting into. As I probably mentioned before, I'm going to treat it like ruderalis with auto genes.
Then when someone makes a cross with one of their breeding packs, it comes out to be what you expected, not a treasure chest of stuff to dig through(if you know what to do with it).
Yet that treasure chest is the whole value of them. That treasure chest is the wide genepool they have to offer. Narrowing it down for breeders really makes no sense and is the opposite of what they should be doing to follow their own philosophy. The thing is, there are many different homozygous lines possible, which they should leave up to breeders buying the breeder pack. The only way it will come out as expected is when you have insight in how its traits inherit.
They made the same mistake with OT haze, someone keeps a population for decades, and they end up selling packs with seeds from two parents while the whole attraction was to have a less limited genepool than o haze.
[QUeOTE="hiiipower, post: 1702404, member: 67221"]But when a f1 is crossed with a f3 or more the progeny result in the f3(IBL or highly worked line) being dominate, even f2 will dominate more. [/QUOTE]Dominate in frequency yes. This is simply because an F3 and even F2 has less variation to add than an F1 and has little to do with inbreeding depression. F3 is technically ibl but still a work in progress. For many gene pairs it will be like crossing AB x CC, and then 50% will be AC, the other half BC. In terms of gene frequency this means 50% C, 25% A, and 25% B so the C dominates in frequency in a population. How they actually express depends on the gene action. The goal and challenge there is to breed in gene C specifically, and not just homozygous pairs. In other words those are IBL-ed to pass on only desirable genes.
In any case, of course everyone prefers high yields or at least normal, but honestly I don't mind and I'm still psyched I got the color I wanted. The silver haze itself is not high yielder either. I do think the hybrid will be better, Having to breed in yield with a higher yielding haze with skunk genes was a backup plan from the start. Currently the goal is to get the color in silver haze dom plants and the use that one instead of the PCK sort of speak.
Although I'm not much into kush, depeding on how things go will probably get some some kosher kush or similar and cross it with red pck male and make a modern version (or fix inbreed depression, or both, whichever is).
Happy with the panama too, smells like citrus/lime hazy and will yield well. Got a healthy clone I will probably flower again. The Panama x SH will likely be very stretchy and grow tall but I expect it will smell very good. 4 more weeks and I will be popping seeds.
