Jealmc: “They should already have a couple million parent line worms, or at least 200,000, so if they have to breed 80% to grow the parent lines it makes me wonder what the hell they have been doing.”
I doubt they have a couple million parent line eggs. The 80% they are breeding now are not going to be bred homozygously (expanding the breeding pool) but cross-bred (to produce hybrid eggs that can be reared for silk.)
Another way to think of this: all 80% of the parent line silkworms will be used to produce hybrid eggs to be reared in future production cycles. It means we have to wait one more cycle for a ‘large’ batch of silkworms, but they are promising us that they will have ‘millions’ of hybrid eggs to use as silk-producing eggs.
If they were planning to homozygously breed this 80%, that would expand the breeding pool but not allow for any additional hybrids to be raised for silk. Nominally it only takes 5,000 parent line silkworms to produce a million eggs, but the actual number is somewhat larger.
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