I like to think I learn fast but I'm guessing I have 6 months of intensive reading hours a day and side branching to fully understand the terms used and how they apply before I even start to really get a grasp on understanding all the variables and how they actually work.
One could easily spend a lifetime on this but I think 6 months may be enough to gain a basic understanding enough to get started or realize its not feasible for me. I'm leaning to the latter but will see.
They say an hour a day for 30 days and you will be on the right path to mastery.
I really see two or three avenues in breeding.
The most common is the home breeder who does a lot of plant selection based off of intuition and familiarity of the stock they are working with. This is most of us and you can't say that it hasn't produced some true winners, so we know it can be effective.
The next step up is the professional breeders who can run plants in large numbers to have a quicker and wider selection process. But they also use the aid of available genetic markers like finding cannabinoid profiles in plants as young as three weeks old. They can also tell the sex at this age and a few other things that the home breeder has to take the time to find out, advantage pro breeder.
Then you have the Big AG / Pharma folks who use genetic marking to identify everything from
terpenes to cannabinoids to leaf color to vigor. They can do this in tissue cultures, they don't even need to grow the plants to build the essential building blocks of super cannabis. They have identified genes related to PM resistance, great, activate that allele in all future strains and PM might be a thing of the past.... advantage science.
I fall under the first category, know a few people who would be the second and I do my darnedest to learn everything I can about the third. You'll have to look outside of this country for most of the meaningful studies with Cannabis. Israel, Spain, Colombia and a few other countries are really doing break-through work with plant genomics.
If you'd like to dive down the rabbit hole of the third category, I've read these and found them interesting -
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PDF | Background: The taxonomic classification of the Cannabis genus has been delineated through three main types: sativa (long and less branched plant... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate
www.researchgate.net