Help with seedling selection from open pollinated batch

[JFlowMan]

I'm brand new to cactus, and could use some guidance. I bought a pack of open pollinated Bridgesii seeds from known clones. SS02, KGC, Helen, and Wowie. This is from succulent source who also sells inactive Trichocereus.

I'm going to assume some of the seeds will have been pollinated with inactive cactus. Does anyone have experience to know if these are instantly low alkaloid? None? I somehow had 85% germination, and need to cull about half anyways. Is it possible to quickly separate these by look? Would it be easier to bin the batch and only use seeds from known pollinations?

If I do let them all grow out, is there an easy way to test a ballpark mescaline content when they're young? I do have a Jiimz Juul clone to use as reference.

 

[Transform]

Check out this "simple high throughput testing" using a skin punch for microsampling and subsequent analysis with a Van der Sypt protocol:

Interesting paper - Mescaline quantification method in fresh cactus

https://zenodo.org/record/6409376#.YkzsKy1h3OS

forum.dmt-nexus.me

 

[JFlowMan]

Check out this "simple high throughput testing" using a skin punch for microsampling and subsequent analysis with a Van der Sypt protocol:

Interesting paper - Mescaline quantification method in fresh cactus

https://zenodo.org/record/6409376#.YkzsKy1h3OS

forum.dmt-nexus.me

Thank you for the link. I was hoping for a little less chemistry, but this method looks very good. It's been a very loong time since i mixed a specific molar solution.

50mm^3 is far smaller than I expected. What size should they be before you'd be comfortable taking a test punch out of them?

 

[Transform]

Thank you for the link. I was hoping for a little less chemistry, but this method looks very good. It's been a very loong time since i mixed a specific molar solution.

50mm^3 is far smaller than I expected. What size should they be before you'd be comfortable taking a test punch out of them?

Unfortunately, quantifying cactus alpaloid conten, will unavoidably involve some chemistry!

As a rule of thumb, I wouldn't sample from anything smaller than my thumb, since it appears that young cacti don't start producing mescaline for several years. Van der Sypt's TBM looks rather bigger than that, however.

Cactus breeding is a bit of a commitment and you'd have to see whether there was even any mescaline at that point, let alone a discernible variation between different specimens.