I dont think you get why people dont "believe" it. Its quite loose on the whole "science" aspect of it.
Adding UVB spectrum to COBs - opinions on this setup?
Yodaweed
Well-Known Member
All I can say at this point is try it for your self.
Look at it this way, if over future millennia the O2 levels on earth drop, its not hard to fathom humans may evolve to develop greater lung capacities. But if you dropped O2 levels tomorrow humans would not instantly adapt. It takes time and reproduction to evolve. As such I feel this information might be more pertinent to breeders of cannabis vs your typical grower. But how UV light can be implemented into breeding regimes is far beyond my scope of knowledge.
I would be curious as to how big a placebo effect would be taking place though... assuming you arent actually having it lab tested.
a mongo frog
Well-Known Member
All you would have to do is ask the people who are saying otherwise to show their lab results. If none are being shown then you may most likely be correct. I say may because someone could produce lab results, but i doubt it.
I would love to be proven wrong here and in epic fashion, I doubt that will happen. But really Id be happy with any data on the subject. If I were contemplating putting UVB in a grow I would rent the article I posted earlier in this thread to try to get some hard data points from it, but Im not.
researching
Well-Known Member
Similar locale we share... (yoda voice) lol
researching
Well-Known Member
IF I decide to spend the money on a lab test I will try to do a side by side, no promises but I am scientifically minded and like proving people wrong. Call it a hobby.
CobKits
Well-Known Member
somebody reputable here, cant remember who, said they were testing + a few % on thc with uvb.
cant remember who? maybe @captainmorgan ?
cant remember who? maybe @captainmorgan ?
researching
Well-Known Member
I have heard 5% increase. Which is substantial. But only one way to know foe sure.
researching
Well-Known Member
I have a friend that lives NW of Canon City in the mountains and would love to teach him and see what he could produce up there.
Yodaweed
Well-Known Member
They get some real good crops there, front range lyfe
Airwalker16
Well-Known Member
It was indeed @captainmorgan
a mongo frog
Well-Known Member
Didn't he say he was going to stop using it? Pretty sure you know he said that. And @CobKits was there when he said that too. Unless I'm way out there and he never said that.
Uberknot
Well-Known Member
I found this which was interesting as it shows a trade off in weight for THC %
"What Is UV Light?
At this point you might be asking, "how is UV light different from normal light?" Even though humans can't see it, a good way to think of UV is to visualize a rainbow and pretend there is an extra color band past the blue and purple. All light is basically just waves of energy, and UV light is just like any other form of radiation. These waves wash over your plants at different frequencies (how many waves pass per second). UV light has a smaller gap between each wave than visible light, which means more waves are passing per second. This gives UV high energy, making it more like an X-ray than a radio wave.
How Does UV Light Effect Marijuana Plants?
But what does all this mean to your cannabis garden? To answer that, we need to investigate how UV light affects plants cells. Ultra-violet radiation, particularly UVB, has been shown to be detrimental to plant cell function. UV causes damage to plant cells in the same way it tears through your skin, eventually causing sunburn. As a result of this damage, all plants have created defenses against UV in the form of gene UVR8.
UVR8 is a protein molecule which senses UV all by itself, and then "tells" plant cells to change their behavior. Exactly how UVR8 molecules sense UV was recently discovered and is pretty interesting. UVR8 is what chemists call a "dimer." which just means that it's made of two structurally similar protein subunits. When UV light hits the two protein subunits in UVR8, their charge weakens and they break apart. To help visualize this, imagine rubbing two balloons against one another. The balloons will stick together because of a static charge. Now imagine the balloons get rained on. The water takes the static charge with it and the two balloons fly apart. In this example, the balloons are the two protein subunits and the rain is UV light cascading down on the plant cell. After the protein subunits break apart, they head to the cell nucleus to deliver their information.
More UV Can Mean More THC
One of these changes caused by this information is very important in your cannabis garden. UV stress stimulates cannabis' production of chemicals via the phenylpropanoid pathway, specifically malonyl-CoA and phenylalanine. Why is this important? It's important because cannabis uses malonyl-CoA to make Olivtol, which it in turn uses to make THC. Now we can see the specific pathway which cannabis uses to increase potency when exposed to UV light.
UV light is already present in your garden, but it's being blocked by the special glass your bulb is made of. Lamp manufacturers must use this type of glass by law because UV light can cause skin cancer when humans are overexposed. You wouldn't want everyone getting cancer from street lights would you? You can increase the amount of UV getting to your cannabis by mixing metal halide bulbs into your bloom room and leaving the glass off your air-cooled hoods. But a better and safer way is to buy and install cheap fluorescent UV lights.
Remember, UV light causes stress to the plant, so put the fluorescents on timers and only have them on for part of the light cycle. Having them on for fifteen minutes of every hour should do the trick. The only downside of this whole process is that yields go down slightly. The plant has to reroute resources and undergoes some physical damage from the UV. As long as you don't overdo the UV the increase in quality is well worth the decrease in yield."
"What Is UV Light?
At this point you might be asking, "how is UV light different from normal light?" Even though humans can't see it, a good way to think of UV is to visualize a rainbow and pretend there is an extra color band past the blue and purple. All light is basically just waves of energy, and UV light is just like any other form of radiation. These waves wash over your plants at different frequencies (how many waves pass per second). UV light has a smaller gap between each wave than visible light, which means more waves are passing per second. This gives UV high energy, making it more like an X-ray than a radio wave.
How Does UV Light Effect Marijuana Plants?
But what does all this mean to your cannabis garden? To answer that, we need to investigate how UV light affects plants cells. Ultra-violet radiation, particularly UVB, has been shown to be detrimental to plant cell function. UV causes damage to plant cells in the same way it tears through your skin, eventually causing sunburn. As a result of this damage, all plants have created defenses against UV in the form of gene UVR8.
UVR8 is a protein molecule which senses UV all by itself, and then "tells" plant cells to change their behavior. Exactly how UVR8 molecules sense UV was recently discovered and is pretty interesting. UVR8 is what chemists call a "dimer." which just means that it's made of two structurally similar protein subunits. When UV light hits the two protein subunits in UVR8, their charge weakens and they break apart. To help visualize this, imagine rubbing two balloons against one another. The balloons will stick together because of a static charge. Now imagine the balloons get rained on. The water takes the static charge with it and the two balloons fly apart. In this example, the balloons are the two protein subunits and the rain is UV light cascading down on the plant cell. After the protein subunits break apart, they head to the cell nucleus to deliver their information.
More UV Can Mean More THC
One of these changes caused by this information is very important in your cannabis garden. UV stress stimulates cannabis' production of chemicals via the phenylpropanoid pathway, specifically malonyl-CoA and phenylalanine. Why is this important? It's important because cannabis uses malonyl-CoA to make Olivtol, which it in turn uses to make THC. Now we can see the specific pathway which cannabis uses to increase potency when exposed to UV light.
UV light is already present in your garden, but it's being blocked by the special glass your bulb is made of. Lamp manufacturers must use this type of glass by law because UV light can cause skin cancer when humans are overexposed. You wouldn't want everyone getting cancer from street lights would you? You can increase the amount of UV getting to your cannabis by mixing metal halide bulbs into your bloom room and leaving the glass off your air-cooled hoods. But a better and safer way is to buy and install cheap fluorescent UV lights.
Remember, UV light causes stress to the plant, so put the fluorescents on timers and only have them on for part of the light cycle. Having them on for fifteen minutes of every hour should do the trick. The only downside of this whole process is that yields go down slightly. The plant has to reroute resources and undergoes some physical damage from the UV. As long as you don't overdo the UV the increase in quality is well worth the decrease in yield."
Abiqua
Well-Known Member
give me a bit...I will find a full version
Airwalker16
Well-Known Member
That's a nice write up. Post your source?
Uberknot
Well-Known Member
Last edited:
Uberknot
Well-Known Member
found it! http://forums.strainhunters.com/topic/4951-how-does-uv-light-effect-marijuana-plants/
Some good stuff there after that.
Abiqua
Well-Known Member
but thats the problem...several of those posted "studies" show a variety of mechanisms and their supposed interactions with the environment etc.
What you are thoughts on the flavonols that may inhibit UV-b and soil components influence on UV influence...those were done on "other" plants and present new arguments imho..
I am fully on board the UV makes a difference train, but when the literature is actually reviewed, the methodologies are weird and actual data is scant.
It makes as much sense as taking the addiction theory in humans from a study on mice.....
Cannabis is technically a weed and a desert plant. It is also dioecious [8% of all plants] and has a very simple genotype in terms of diploid number 2n....with little known polyploidy...on top of all those reasonably similar characteristics, it produces more compounds than just about any other known plant. We still are finding new compounds....
The plant may also exhibit traces of both C3 and C4 [this is where the desert plant aka Central Asia origins? may come in] respiration.
I think it is too easy to gloss over and say this is just a simple plant. Well maybe we taken as a far look back, but even the genome hasn't been fully sequenced.
Just some thoughts
Abiqua
Well-Known Member
SC labs gave a talk in may 2016?
at harvard about the 2015 emerald cup....
The top 20 winners tested higher about 1.5 standard deviations higher in terpenoid content on average than the overall sample size which was either 400 430.
Thc content was specifically mentioned as not being necessarily the highest in the Top 20 samples...
That said, there is no info on growing. Being the Emerald cup, I bet a majority is organic outdo, but....and might also lend credence to the argument that THC % alone, doesn't mean much on the surface.....
at harvard about the 2015 emerald cup....
The top 20 winners tested higher about 1.5 standard deviations higher in terpenoid content on average than the overall sample size which was either 400 430.
Thc content was specifically mentioned as not being necessarily the highest in the Top 20 samples...
That said, there is no info on growing. Being the Emerald cup, I bet a majority is organic outdo, but....and might also lend credence to the argument that THC % alone, doesn't mean much on the surface.....