You may have it exactly right. Academic’s especially from Berkley have a reputation for patent races. They are still fighting MIT for crisper
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I was referring to BioHarvest, not Lygos. Haven’t done my reading on it yet but it doesn’t immediately give me the heebie jeebies like BHSC does…
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It’s easier to produce one enzyme than a whole synthetic cluster. But everything has a catch. Unless precursors can be easily sourced there’s still a problem.
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Making the CBGa type precursors is the easy part. They’re typically achiral and you’d leave the “hard” part for the synthase to handle.
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PVC pipe and coffee filters?
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I’m at a CBD EXPO in Indianapolis. Aisles on aisles of tinctures, vapes, gummies, sublingual strips, mouth spray, dabble products and more. Missy of the foot traffic is from retail owners looking for products.
All anyone wants is smokable flower.
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why does it look like this
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The interesting thing here is that these are the actual plant cells, making all the minor cannabinoids, terpenes, esters, etc., alongside THC.
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If you like mushrooms, you’ll love tissue culture!
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Problem with growing yeast in a homogeneous broth with cannabinoids is that cannabinoids are going to kill the yeast after they get above a certain concentration. The only reason the plant can reach 20%+ cannabinoids, is that it sequesters them in trichomes which are basically expendable vessels.
You aren’t going to get high cannabinoid concentrations (thus commercial scalability) unless you produce the cannabinoids in an expendable vessel that is separate from whatever cellular machinery is doing the carbon fixation. So homogenous cell culture (the easiest fermentation type) is never going to be scalable imo… Well at least for the normal cannabinoids the plant provides.
Youd need to do trichomes on a surface of cells fixing the carbon… And you’d need a shit ton of surface… Which is not easy. Basically you’d need to reinvent the highly packed structure of the cannabis flower to get them at high concentration… Or teach a root culture to grow trichomes possibly. But yeast ain’t gonna get you there.
Tomatoe plants also have pretty high trichome density on their leaves… And without any need to flower to get those trichomes. But either way plants are highly effective at producing secondary metabolites and it seems a bit foolish to try and reinvent the wheel and have dissimbodied cells in a vat. Much easier and scalable to just modify an existing plant to get the cannabinoids you want, which can be grown adnausium from seed/cuts.
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With 33% tac and a kilo on a 600w lamp in less than 2 months…
I would like to see yeast produc 330g of cannabinoids…
Rest assured that the cannabis plant is the most abundant producer of specialized secondary metabilites in the plant world…
Maybe when the outdoor game goea to hell when nature unleashes its full wrath this will start being an option…
But for the API game its perfect,though …
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I agree, but that makes it even more complex. You have one extracellular matrix, that contains all nutrients and every individual export (entourage and not), that you would have to refine and reformulate containing only the entourage elements (which may or may not all be known or recoverable).
Don’t get got up in yeast. Algae can also be trained to fart cannabinoids with the added bonus of photosynthesis. Algae that grows trichomes, strain specific. It looks like trichome carpet
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In a grow area that can produce 0.3 ton cannabinoids from the plant you get 2 ton from cannabinoid farting algae, no 600 wat lamps required
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Also, with more than a billion dollar market, why hasn’t opium production been taken from the middle east and put into cell culture? The CIA literally works with terrorists in order to secure the US’s pain medications every year in a large purchase. Instead of funding terrorists why not produce domestic crops and/or move to cell culture. Most likely for the same reasons @GrzA brings up.
Edit:while working at aldevron, we made 20g of DNA from e. Coli cells. It took weeks, and many expensive chromatography columns. Not to mention the upstream rooms smell like a bathroom bc of all the bacteria.
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Yeah i really don’t understand the impetus on these projects or how they’ll be profitable. Large outdoor grows are so easy to scale. Hemp has crashed from overproduction. Growing to generate the CBD is NOT the pinch point here…
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I think it has a lot to do with just nailing down the technology, understand the substrate scope and allowing for future means of production of “unnatural” cannabinoids that may have pharmacological properties much different from your garden-variety pentyl-tailed ones.
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They’re profitable because the science is so out there for regular folks that they can basically say whatever they want and investors will believe them…
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Sure, and that makes sense, but that’s not the way it’s being marketed here. What I’m questioning is this talk about “the plant will be obsolete”. The plant can produce unlimited acreage of biomass growing at 20%+ for very little effort and does so so cheaply that farmers can hardly even give it away. How efficient would this have to be to beat that? As someone indicated, we still grow poppies, and their yield is terrible compared to hemp.
There’s still people sitting on 2019 harvest material… Why would we need this when we couldn’t even use up what’s already been grown even when it’s selling less than $1/lb?
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Preach.
Growing cannabis isn’t going away…
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