Just curious if the plant would flower under 16 hrs. of light, be larger than the auto parent, or what one might "generally" expect from this cross?
Photo x auto crosses supposedly start and finish flowering a little earlier than the photo parent, and will likely be somewhat larger than the auto parent. Supposedly yes, they will flower with a little more light than the pure photo parent would.
I can't answer the question about whether or not they'll flower specifically under 16 hours of light. I just don't know the answer though I'm speculating that its possible and might depend on exactly which photo and auto you've crossed.
Another question: how are autos as far as cloning? HAve not seen much on cloning autos. Thanks!-
The reason you haven't is that auto plants can't be maintained in "mother" form to generate clones.
Yes, you can take a cutting from an auto and root it, but the clone will mature just as fast as the mother, and when the mother is done, so will the clone be. There is no advantage to taking such a cutting; the net effect is just to reduce your overall yield without maintaining the genetics you're after.
you have to breed them back and forth for about 15 generations before you get the stable auto flower with the photo characteristics that you want...
Well, depending on what you're trying to accomplish, it can take that many crosses to create a "pure" autoflowering version of a standard photoperiod plant, though in practice, very few breeders really go that far, and you can get most of the way there in quite a few generations sooner than that. I don't think this is what the original poster was asking about, though.
mating an autoflower to a photoperiod plant will result in some of the seeds being autoflower and some of the seeds will be photosensitive. assuming the male is the autoflower, preserving the pollen from the father and using it to pollinate the seeds which exhibit the autoflower trait will result in even more seeds which autoflower and a smaller percentage which still exhibit photosensitive traits. Pollinating the females which autoflower from this batch should get you pretty close to all of the resulting seeds exhibiting autoflower traits. If not then one more time using the original pollen on that batch surly would.
I don't believe this is correct.
Since the most common autoflower gene is recessive, it requires TWO copies (one from each parent) for any offspring plant to be autoflowering.
If you cross an auto with a photoperiod plant, each of the offspring will only carry ONE copy of the autoflowering gene (from the auto parent) and you would expect NONE of these F1 offspring to be autos.
If you then crossed two of these F1 plants to create an F2 generation, you would expect ONE QUARTER of the ensuing F2 generation to be autoflowering.
And if you then crossed two AUTOFLOWERING F3s (or an autoflower F3 with any other auto) you'd expect all of those offspring (or nearly all) to be autoflowering.