is autoflowering a recessive trait that's easy to breed out?

i bred an autflowering super cali haze with a joey weed C99 and then bred that gal i called fruity booty with a joey weed C99 x A11 male for a second generation cross i wanted to just keep muttin' up with every breeding session just for fun to see what i get in a dozen generations or maybe even use to cross back to my current 75% C99 25% A11 for some hybrid vigor and my own C99 hybrid. i also have a masterkush lowryder x (C99 x A11) i only wanted to use for it's deep dark red pheno probably with cherry buddha's sister.

does the autoflowering trait breed out quickly? something i read from one breeder saying he selected for that trait made it sound like it gets dominated by light cycle flowering which is fine with me. i might like to marry the super cali haze lowryder from my first grow that can exhibit grape terpenes under a halide with trippier and extra fruity sweet haze to get the best of each others' traits with plants that can be cloned for future breeding.

does anyone have any experience breeding lowryders with regs and how persistent autoflowering is? another reason i'd like to move away from that trait is that it's easier to fill a SCROG screen if you can control the onset of flowering.

my SCH x C99 fruity booty gal seemed more compact than even C99 making me guess it was an auto. i think the SCH took it's time to flip.

Hazey, I'm taking you off "ignore" for a moment to answer this rambling question.

I'm also going to disregard the fact that what you claim to be doing (namely creating unstable mutt plants with simple crosses) isn't actually "breeding". I'm answering mainly because I think its a fundamentally good question, and because the answer may be helpful to some who read here.

Contrary to what you suggest, the way to tell if a plant is an autoflower is simply to see if it flowers under more than 18 hours of daily continuous lighting. If so, its an auto. If not, its not. Height has nothing to do with it.

The quick answer to your question is "yes" the autoflower trait is recessive, but NO, its not "easy" to breed out.

Its certainly POSSIBLE to breed it out, *IF* you know what you are doing and are willing to do the work, but again you're talking about doing it in the context of an actual breeding project involving multiple generations of selection, not some home-grown "pollen chucking" of dubious structure and direction.

In the "real world" actual breeders try to introduce the autoflowering trait INTO plants that lack it. Nobody tries to breed the autoflowering gene OUT of lines have it.

That's because all the autoflowering plants with OTHER desirable traits (flavor, potency, whatever) got them from NON-autoflowering plants. If you are interested in isolating those traits into a new line you're breeding, you should start with the original source material, not the worked/diluted autoflowering versions.

Breeding OUT the autoflowering trait is a lot harder than putting it in to begin with, another good reason why serious breeders aren't going to want to try.

But purely for the sake of discussion, lets say you had some compelling reason to want to do this anyway. Again, the autoflowering trait seen in lowryders behaves like a simple autosomal recessive trait.

That means in theory 1/4 of the F2 generation (not F1) from an auto/non-auto cross should carry no auto genes. These are the plants you're after.

Unfortunately, IDENTIFYING these plants is going to be difficult since the non-autoflowering plants that carry no autoflower genes may appear similar to ones that carry only one autoflower gene (and also don't autoflower). In other words, so far as I know, there is no definite way to tell a sibling plant with one auto gene from one with no auto genes, meaning there is no good way to do the selection you'd need to do to get what you are after.

One clue here is that autoflower heterozygotes may complete flowering a bit earlier than similar non-autoflowers of the same generation, but that's not necessarily reliable, and determining this at the END of flowering is of limited value too.

So, I'd say there are two ways you could go about this; neither is fast, and which is better depends on the nature of your project and your growing constraints.

One very simple way would be just to run all 6-7 generations of your breeding project crossing only non-autos and culling out any autos that appeared. If you did this, the chance of your F7 carrying one autoflower gene would be really small, only about 1-2%. If you were doing sibling crosses and went 2-3 generations without seeing any autos, you'd probably have the auto gene breeded out.

A more definitive way would be to run parallel test crosses of your selected plants with an auto to generate a batch of "sacrificial" offspring. If none of the offspring of your selected plant with an auto went auto, you'd know it carried no auto genes, and you'd be good to go. If you got any, then your select plant carried one auto gene, and you'd best reject it in favor of another, or repeat the test cross in a later generation. Unfortunately, this is also a lot of work, because not only would you have to finish up one mom to generate seeds, you'd then have to germinate and raise many of them to check. So this "test" would be expected to take months.