Cannabis Tissue Culture or Invitro Micropropagation
Hey Guys!
I wanted to post this to see what the general consensus on cannabis tissue culture was in our beautiful country ;). What do you guys think about it? I have been doing tissue culture in the west coast and understand people are slowly starting to look into it. What is the east coast like?
For those of you who do not know:
What is Tissue Culture? It is the ability to propagate plants from tiny totipotent tissue. Furthermore, it is the ability to harness the power of exponential propagation while also providing 100 percent sterile plantlets to the grower. Finally if the meristem tissue is utilized, the cannabis plant comes back fully reinvigorated, imitating the original cut of that phenotype. If you are interested in more information check out www.eclipseconsultation.com
We tried tissue culture at the facility I work at now, it was a giant waste of time and money, it added like 3 months to the grow cycle cause they start so little, and take forever to become normal sized. Our lab is being completed in the room it was in, so at least it was good for something.
Ah thank you for your input :). Did you by any chance have a professional help you? Or were you buying those kits? Where did you see most failures happen at your lab?
Yeah we had to pay some scientist waaayyyy too much money to run it, we had a very sophisticated setup that I’m sure was very expensive. The clones outperformed in our facility in every way making it a very easy choice to can that whole operation. I am very curious though of the benefits from grows who implemented, and liked it as well as what are the benefits of it opposed to other ways of propagation. We are a good size commercial grow so I think that could be where the problem was, needing 2000 clones a week is a lot.
Well from my personal experience and speaking for the people I’ve talked to/ worked with, some of the major pros are the fact that you can bank genetics, have sterile clones, reinvigorate your plants, and also the ability to run an exponential amount of plants in a small area. Furthermore, it allows you to have the possibility of removing mothers. Of course it has to be a successful SOP and program to have good cause to utilize this procedure. This is due to the time, skill level needed, and initial investment.
I was just speaking to my colleagues about this. We have Tissue culture incubators and diurnal growth chambers that have been standard in pharmaceutical and microbiology labs for decades. I have been wondering when we will find their use in the Cannabis industry. I’d like to hear more about making it an efficient and sustainable part of the cultivation cycle.
Incredibly useful! You can never have too many sterile enviornments in a tc lab
So, I am working for a few different groups, and a few have notably mentioned to me that they have attempted TC, on a professional scale, but did not see it useful for their high throughput necessities. I have experience with TC, quite a bit from school, and a few groups are interested in maintaining their genetic samples for an extended period of time, to use at a later time. But no one is really putting that as a priority, in my opinion. I personally prefer doing TC, to extraction/processing genre work, but its harder work to come by in this industry. 
Alan Rockafeller in Oakland may be able to help get people started with DNA. It would be nice to have a open source repository system for TC with known DNA for strains. This could potentially be done with the help of a few individuals wanting to take part in the collection. I started messing with cannaTC in ‘08 but only really used it to clean strains that got infections. I’d love to know what people have learned since I stopped.
that kinda data would also be a fucking goldmine for genetics research
I’ve been doing some research on tissue culture, but have very little hands on experience. My understanding is the biggest problem is there are so many hormones the plant uses to grow and we are only guessing at them currently. I posted a new study that details the plant hormones at day 3/6/9/15/20 and the genes that are turned on so you can get a better idea of what hormones to feed when for tissue culture. I’ve also been in touch with a few of the people like Mike Hydro and others from cultivar and some researchers in the Czech republic on these issues. I’ve posted quite a few of these studies to my IG and I believe I added them to the data dump. If not I’ll add those tissue culture studies and such soon!
thank you mr yogibear :). your yogibear right?
Yep! That’s me and this is something I’m really interested in. There’s some good tech coming for the tissue culture stuff. And like everyone’s saying cleaning up infections and banking genetics is good. However to me the best part is that you can reset epigenetics changes/what the environment does to the plant.
We built a tc lab in our facility, have had two commercial companies try to operate it. They can create starters successfully on small scale, but not enough at a commercial level. Neither operator was successful with every cultivar, just with some that are more vigorous to begin with.
My favorite and the most potent strain i ever grew was lost do to genetic drift It was an Indica dominant phenotype of green crack that never tested below 28% thc. It was mothered every couple of generations but after ~8 years of growing it started to not take root more and more dropping to 50% then down below 25% of cuttings taking root when normally i get 90%+. I tried colloidal silver at the end to try to get seeds, which im not even sure would have even helped but it didnt work.
A Tissue Culture Lab would Need:
Laminar Flow Hood
Incubator
Humidity
CO2
Lighting?
What else?
phytohormones and other gel media for cultivation, microscope, various sterile scalpels and related tools for a start…
you need an autoclave for sterilization a fridge a dishwasher and etc. Also @Plant2pipe next time if you need tc for genetic banking reach out to me. If you are in the California area i have students who would be down to reinvigorate and sterilize genetics for a fee. Stage 1 is the easiest in TC. Stage 3 is the harder, and stage 0 which is callus cell regeneration or meristem regeneration is the hardest.
I prob wont be in that situation again anytime soon cause individual strains dont survive the adhd fashion show that is the weed market out here for more than a few cycles lol but i appreciate the offer. If i ever find a similar phenotype i will def hit u up, i was so sad when we finally lost the last one, it was the first strain i ever grew and my personal favorite still to this day
Do you know if anyone has somatic embryogenesis out of liquid culture going? It seems like the most viable method for generating artificial seeds or even clones in the numbers required by some of these monster grows.
I spent my youth toiling at Zeocon/Sandoz crop protection, and worked in a lab doing some of the early somatic embrogeneis work in Soy, Cotton, and Maize.
I’d love to get a tissue culture up and running…but the list of other things that my current employer needs done first is pretty daunting.
Know anyone in Oregon looking for talent?