Decided to look this up. Turns out my suspicion was correct. Cloning involves mitosis so it's no different than germinating a seed. You can read about it below. If you don't know the difference between meiosis and mitosis you can look that up too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragmen..._(reproduction)

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this thread. It appears that as long as you have good clones, it's not a problem.

I did hear a rumor today that some breeders have been able to design a plant that will fail if cloned too many times. Sounds like science fiction to me, but I don't know.

YGB

The answer is 42!
And don't forget a towel..

I think the confusion here is that we are calling cuttins clones when they are not. A true clone is grown from one single cell and is manipulated to multiply and then differentiate to all the different kinds of cells. Because it starts with one single cell then there are higher chances that it will have genetic drift along the way. But when you start with a high population of cells that are already differentiated, and the new root cells will differentiate and grow from a group-effort by all the others, there is far less chance of drift. Then, since the roots come from a variety of cells, if one root strand has problems, it can die off and let the good ones keep growing, basically by the rules of natural selection -the ones that are healthy and work well beat out the bad ones. Only if you actually cloned the plants from a single cell would you worry about genetic drift, and even then not a lot because plants are also less complex than higher organisms (usually) and this means that there is not so much complexity to go wrong.
So the answer is that you can clone plants forever because rooting a cutting is not really cloning. It is just an easy word to use and has become a commonly known label for the process of rooting cuttings.

you're referring to animal clones, when you say this. since yes, animal clones do originate from one cell (usually a empty cell transplanted with genetic material)

a 'true' clone is a separate organism genetically identical to the parent, regardless of how it began. So a plant 'clone' is merely describing the sameness between both plants.

cloning plants is the same idea as planting potatoes or carrots. etc.

__________________
joe

identical, key word people
/debate

Yes, exactly. There is confusion between animal and plant cloning. Because we use the same word 'clone' in both cases, people do not realize there are differences. Problems that occur in animal cloning do not apply to plant cloning because they are not the same thing even though we use the same word to describe them. We could start calling plant clones 'duplicates' to indicate the difference, but that would require everyone to be on-board with the new terminology and that won't happen. So we must just realize that they are two separate things and say that to those who are confused.

I know that with plants there can be an Inbred Depression that will not show itself until 100's if not 1000's of generations of clone from the seed, I know this because my 91 year old Uncle was a breeder of potatoes and corn and wheat and soybeans, well you name it he bred it from around 1946 to present day. I do believe that if you were to clone a clone, and so on for 25 years you would have degradation of the basic cellular structure required to do its job properly and it would lose its vigor and potency and yield characteristics.

I think people like to assume based on facts they saw in the latest sci-fi thriller about cloning, that it is infallible, which is not the case, a plant loses something on a cellular level every single time its cloned, I do not base this on any sort of science except for what I have witnessed or been a part of first hand, and that is plants do not clone themselves in nature, the species either inbreeds if possible or if left alone in the wild chances are it will pop its own seeds as a type of defense mechanism to ensure the species is continued, if you ever have the patience and yield to experiment, try letting any strain completely mature and die on the stalk...chances are you will find seeds on the outermost edges if your strain has any hint of landrace or ruderalis genetics in it.

__________________
MY White Widow Hempy Trees http://www.rollitup.org/grow-journals/237596-white-widow-tree-grow-hempy.html

love the thread, cloning is a good term, but i believe it's more accurate to describe as vegetative reproduction
many plants can reproduce vegetatively, including some noxious weeds
raspberry plants reproduce vegetatively, the tips of their canes droop until they touch the ground, then they root to form a new plant
i've seen many growers that clone their clone their clone...
for practical purposes, it does seem like you can keep cloning that treasured femme for a very long time

__________________
curent grow: http://www.rollitup.org/cfl-growing/249942-how-low-can-you-go.html

Very good and interesting points. I'm not sure too many MJ growers are worried about what hapens 25 years out rather than over the next few. But you make a good point about the repercussions of long-term repetitive damage to plants such as cloning. I wonder if the same issues would appear if I repeatedly and violently damaged the same plant over a long period of time, especially the same part every time such as the roots when cloning. It also brings up the question of telomere length and whether the MJ plant could last long enough to show such issues, and how much of it is caused by the act of cloning and how much is due to the combination of age and repetitive damage to the same part of the plant over time. So I also wonder if the same issues would occur of you were to clone the same mother repetitively over a long time rather than cloning a clone repetitively. That is the real question anyway, is it definitively worse to clone a clone rather than clone the same mother over time? In any case, while you make great points I am not completely convinced that the degradation can be totally ascribed to repetitive cloning alone.