phytochrome manipulation

growlights · Jul 16, 2014

Max Frost said:
Thanks! I appreciate your opinion!! How long would you suggest leaving the 730nm diodes on? I'd love to try the 11/13, or even 10/14...but I run a perpetual harvest, so this makes it counter-productive. The pontoon does not give you separate control over the 730 diodes, I don't know if there may be a way around this, but I'm going to be thinking about it.

What would be the optimum way to use them, and burn for how long? Thanks in advance!! Best, -Max

EDIT - Another Question...Since I just turned the photo period back to 12/12 around 2 weeks ago, do you think maybe I just haven't given it enough time yet to see the difference? Maybe I just need to sit back and see what differences that makes. I wonder how long it will take to see the full effects of changing to 12/12? Any thoughts there? Thanks again!!

I have stand alone 730nm Flower Initiators and 660.680 Deep Red boosters, I partner with Inda-Gro, they first saw the effect with my lights.

Some video - and

caveman4.20 · Jul 16, 2014

I would love to finish ny Sept 18 :mad:

growlights · Jul 17, 2014

It is certainly beneficial.

SunGrown · Jul 17, 2014

growlights said:
It is certainly beneficial.

so, if I run a couple of these "lights" on some outdoor girls a little at sunset and a little at sunrise in june or july then the crop flips and stays flipped till harvest?

with no covering?

and if so for how many days do I run these "lights"?

@growlights , I watched a few of your videos but there isn't a lot of details included so I ask here.

Thanks in advance!

growlights · Jul 17, 2014

SunGrown said:
so, if I run a couple of these "lights" on some outdoor girls a little at sunset and a little at sunrise in june or july then the crop flips and stays flipped till harvest?

with no covering?

and if so for how many days do I run these "lights"?

@growlights , I watched a few of your videos but there isn't a lot of details included so I ask here.

Thanks in advance!

It depends upon your latitude as to when it will work best, Most certainly when your local night reaches 10 hours in length the flower initiator will trigger the phytochrome to change state rapidly and make the plant respond as if the night is 12 hours in length ( pretty critical for largely sativa strains). As you know some specie will begin to flower with a shorter night, if one knows when, the date, they would normally begin to flower for that unique location, one can estimate an earlier date with a night that is two hours longer and begin initiation at that date.

June is problematic, the days continue to lengthen until the 21st, which seems to confuse the phytochrome somewhat with using the flower initiator. I have used black out cloth in June to get flowering to start with the initiator.

My 2014 project was initiated on July 4th without black out cloth, I see many pistils, spikes and a general change of growth towards full on flowering right now, July 17th. The actual location, geography etc. are factors that one must learn and adjust for to get optimum results.

With black out cloth, you can cover to 12/12 for a week or so then when flower are developing switch to a 14/10 period until the night reaches 10 hours, then no more black out needed.

You run the lights until the harvest is ready to cut. The 10 watt will cover about 8' X 8' the 20 watt about 16' X 16'.

More videos coming that spell things out more clearly, for outdoors and indoors use.

SunGrown · Jul 17, 2014

thanks for the reply.

I am in norcal, sierra foothills. I know all my strains well and when they naturally flower so that is no problem, I would need one light per plant on the main gardens, but only a few for the dep structures I think.
If you want any online testers I would do it, but I may end up buying some of your lights once I see more details and proof of function.

I look forward to more videos.

growlights · Jul 17, 2014

SunGrown said:
thanks for the reply.

I am in norcal, sierra foothills. I know all my strains well and when they naturally flower so that is no problem, I would need one light per plant on the main gardens, but only a few for the dep structures I think.
If you want any online testers I would do it, but I may end up buying some of your lights once I see more details and proof of function.

I look forward to more videos.

I have provided free lamps for testing in the past, it seems without a bit of an investment the ball gets dropped. I have sold them at wholesale to some growers who did complete their projects, I am wiling to do that, in that is tough to get that kind of unbiased reporting.

I too am in Norcal, Sonoma county.

SunGrown · Jul 17, 2014

Well, I do what I say I will do but yeah, we will talk more soon I am sure.

Sonoma is only a few hours away, but getting me to leave home is VERY hard to do. But I am very interested in this process and think it is worth pursuing.

growlights · Jul 17, 2014

SunGrown said:
Well, I do what I say I will do but yeah, we will talk more soon I am sure.

Sonoma is only a few hours away, but getting me to leave home is VERY hard to do. But I am very interested in this process and think it is worth pursuing.

I seldom leave home as well. I will post more info as the current project develops. Perhaps I can supply one for your testing.

KiLoEleMeNt · Oct 31, 2014

Hello everyone I am down about halfway through the thread at the moment so sorry if i just have not gotten to it yet but i wanted to chime in for some advice

So what i have going on is i have a 15 X 15 sealed grow room with ebb n flow buckets and table i decided i wanted to try my hand at autos and see what they can do but I also have a few regular plants now my auto flower plants are doing some crazy stuff but my regular plants don't seem to be very affected by the issue and I am not even sure yet weather my hunch is correct or not what I believe is going on is i that I have two Infrared cameras mounted on my walls and when lights go out IR goes on and what I would like to know is can I use this to my advantage I have not even seen IR be mentioned yet in this thread but like I said I'm only 1/2 way down cuz I have had to re read it a few times to get an understanding of what was being said lol any thoughts and questions if you need more info are greatly appreciated so i can figure this out the first picture is of the Strang auto problem the second how the regular are growing and third a view from the cam at lights out

dogznova · Oct 31, 2014

Infrared is 800 to 900 nm plus.. Not much use to the plants.

But some studies are being done to see how much infrared effects the plants critical darkness.

Far red 730 nm is a much better critical darkness manipulator..

Approximately 2 hours of the plants critical darkness can be manipulated using 730 nm far red. But one must understand BLUE lights effects one the daylight side..

Meaning if BLUE light is present past the 12 hr mark (during the daylight) even if you're manipulating the plants critical darkness, flowers become less desirable with their calyx to leaf ratio.

Yes the grower can add 2 hr of light after flowers set in and switch to a 14/10 lighting. But if it's an HPS or MH being used past the 12 hr mark on the daylight side.. The plant starts to get confused. HPS and MH bothe have way too much BLUE light.

What happens is the flowers become loose and fluffy then the flowers start showing single bladed leaves.. A sign 1/2 flowering 1/2 vegging flowers.

To avoid this problem.. Use a Red/Far red light combo that has no BLUE light for hours 13 and 14.

The indoor flowering schedule (after flowers set in) would look something like this.
12hr HPS.
2hr Red/Far Red No BLUE light.
1/2 hr to 45 mins of (730 nm only) for critical darkness manipulation.

Thats a 14.5/10 indoor flowering schedule for success. Plants will think they are running on approx a 11.5/12.5 flowering schedule..

Hope that helps.

squiggly · Oct 31, 2014

dogznova said:
Infrared is 800 to 900 nm plus.. Not much use to the plants.

The indoor flowering schedule (after flowers set in) would look something like this.
12hr HPS.
2hr Red/Far Red No BLUE light.
1/2 hr to 45 mins of (730 nm only) for critical darkness manipulation.

Thats a 14.5/10 indoor flowering schedule for success. Plants will think they are running on approx a 11.5/12.5 flowering schedule..

Hope that helps.

Do you have citiations for any of this?

Everything I can find suggests precisely the opposite of what you're saying.

The chromoprotein responsible for regulating photoperiodism responds only to red and far red light.

Red light converts the protein to the active form (Pfr).
Far red light converts the protein to the inactive form (Pr).

At dawn the plant "measures" the Pr/Pfr ratio and uses the result to stimulate responses like flowering, vegetative growth, etc--relative to whatever the ratio is.

If you were to use red and far red light primarily for the last 2-3 hours you would be essentially cancelling out any effect you meant to have.

The proper way to do this is to use whatever light you want to use for the full 14 hours, and then end the photoperiod with 2-5 minutes of far red light ONLY. This will convert the majority of the Pfr to Pr and will allow the ratio to fall within flowering response levels at the beginning of the next photoperiod. This is how it's been done in all of the 10 or so papers I've read on the effect, and it aligns with easily accessible info about the phytochrome system online.

Blue light will not confuse this mechanism at all because the chromoprotein does not "see" it.

I suspect the issue you may have seen in terms of weird plant growth is a result of misunderstanding the correct application of the FR light (which should be the ONLY light source supplied at the end of the photoperiod to get the desired effect).

squiggly · Oct 31, 2014

As a small addendum I've seen experiments push the photoperiod as far as 18 hours normal light + 30min FR and still have normal flowering growth.

Not sure how far the tolerances can be pushed for cannabis, but it's worth checking out methinks.

dogznova · Oct 31, 2014

dogznova · Oct 31, 2014

If 14 hrs of HPS and 2-3 min of FR at nightfall works so well..

Run that light schedule from day 1 of 12/12 a get back to me..

Real world results will show you the truth.

squiggly · Oct 31, 2014

Am I to believe the laws of physics work differently in a laboratory as opposed to the "real world"?

It so happens that I do use FR light (or I should say I did when I was growing), and had excellent real world results.

The fact remains, Pr/Pfr are not sensitive to blue light. The chromophore does not have any allowed electron transitions with energies corresponding to blue light.

Physically not possible.

squiggly · Oct 31, 2014

I mean shit we can even classify this chromophore and go through predicting the wavelengths of absorption, it's not that complicated of a molecule.

Its a system of heteroannular and homoannular conjugated dienes (with elongated conjugations on both sides of the cis/trans moieties)

We'd use Woodward-Fieser rules to classify the compound and predict the transitions--luckily, though, we don't have to predict as the stuff has been synthesized many times and it's absorption maxima plotted.

There are some very small absorptions in the blue spectrum at the top end (495), but these cannot cause the conformational change that is necessary. Any absorbed blue light is absorbed as a result of instantaneous conformational changes in local molecular geometry (molecules move and twist and bend)--but because these distorted geometries are not long lived enough the photon is likely re-emitted and the energy of the molecule relaxed on a time scale to short for the conformational change to take place.

We know from studies of the Pr/Pfr kinetics that the conformational change happens along the order of microseconds and occurs in steps. Microseconds are long time scales for molecules (which usually like to work in picoseconds or femtoseconds), without the proper energy the excited state can't be maintained for long enough (or in this case, probably isn't "excited" enough to begin with).

Essentially what is happening is that an effect analogous to ligand field stabilization energies is being observed, only without a metal center.

As the conjugated system is elongated, and more bonds are formed, the energy separation between neighboring orbitals shrinks. The conjugated nature of the system allows this effect to permate the entire system as opposed to what we'd expect to see for a diene all by itself (an abosrption in the UV range). The shorter energy separation corresponds to a lower energy needed for transition, and thus a longer absorbed wavelength.

dogznova · Oct 31, 2014

lets see the 14/10 from day 1 results you speak of..

Shit, you would be the first to get cannabis to flower from day 1 with that schedule..

squiggly · Oct 31, 2014

dogznova said:
lets see the 14/10 from day 1 results you speak of..

Shit, you would be the first to get cannabis to flower from day 1 with that schedule..

I don't think we've had a lot of interaction in the past, but it's known pretty ubiquitously here that I don't do pics.

Being paranoid, I'm doing it right.

All that being said, the physics of it just don't lie. It's reality.

If we were talking the big bang or even something like climate science, I'd give you waaaaaaaaay more leeway. This, though, is something we have an extremely discrete understanding of.

We are super good at spectroscopy, it might be one of the things we're best at understanding in the physical sciences (because we use so many different types of spectroscopy to probe all of this behavior).

When it comes to light/color/etc. we actually have an extremely robust understanding.

I mean it's as simple as this:

Hundreds of people have isolated this thing and shot at it with all types of light and noted the effects. The effects were the same in all cases.

That was scaled up and was tested on live plants, again the study confirmed the expectations from results gained during spectral and kinetic study. Science is really at its best when it can make predictions about something its never observed based on theory alone--that's when you know you have a great theory working for you, when it's predictive.

When it comes to this crap, it's about as predictive as it gets. You can usually nail down wavelengths to within a nanometer. Even a bad instrument will give you a tolerance of +/- 10nm.

squiggly · Oct 31, 2014

I'll just say this, in a day and age where people shoot single electrons out of single atom sized needles and detect the interference pattern experienced by the electron to make an image of atom-scale objects--I think we have a pretty solid grasp on electrons and how they work.

All the absorbed wavelength corresponds to is what an electron is doing and where its going. That's it.

You're tracking a single electron through a molecule. It doesn't get any easier, we don't even need to know what the whole system is doing. Just the ground state of the system.

phytochrome manipulation

phytochrome manipulation

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