Not the first and certainly not the last. Curious to hear thoughts on this.
3 Likes
Phylos trojan horsed people. The ig generation of the cannabis community gave up the crowned jewels for a little insight, and a whole lot of fluff. The flip side is good luck enforcing your IP. When any strain can be stolen by an employee making $15 an hour , any advancement is sure to be stolen.
8 Likes
“Provided herein is the identification and markers and genes associated with day-neutral autoflowering in plants and their use in selecting plants, including Cannabis plants, having autoflowering activity.”
What is the real world application? I thought autos were easy to breed, and that the gene is dominant and easy to detect.
1 Like
Couldn’t you take any strain and flip the markers for auto flowering this way though?
(I only have cursory knowledge of this stuff)
1 Like
It’d be nice to see someone go after them for deceptive trade practices, no one would have entered into business with them knowing what they would do
3 Likes
That would be cool if so. Autos could then be as strong as any other strain without having to have ruderalis ditchweed in their breeding.
4 Likes
I think that is actually the case here.
Could be wrong, but just a quick read of the patent seems to point out where the genes are that determine the auto flowering trait. Then it goes into how to edit things in those locations.
Again, I’m definitely a layman, but that is what I got out of it.
Can anyone confirm if I’m full of shit?
2 Likes
Didn’t you guys apply for an auto flowering patent too?
Patented cannabis? Where are their R&D grows? Who’s the plug for hemp pollen elbows?
2 Likes
We defensively applied for utility patent protection for auto / photo F1 hybrids, then expressly abandoned the application (which makes it 100% in the public sphere permanently). Doing the same for the inactive THCAS we discovered as well. The Phylos patent covers gene editing and the commercialization of PCR-based testing of two targeted alleles on chromosome 1.
We discovered–independently–different markers associated with the auto flowering trait on chromosome 1 before they filed for their patent. There’s a lot of interest in the research community to find out if these truly are “THE” autoflower genes; we’re going through our whole genome data to corroborate the patent application.
11 Likes
Yea im willing to bet this is a patent on using something like crispr to gene edit in the auto flower genes, imagine doing this to the real wedding cake or something you could grow it year around in any sunny climate
@cyclopath what do you think about this patent?
2 Likes
Having no experience with autos except seeing a gg4 auto flower , it was premature looking smell and taste.
So hypothetically if you put the auto gene on wedding cake , it would still lead to the terps flower cannaboids still being off and not the same?
2 Likes
Does the AF gene travel with the feral nature genes… Making AF without GMO technology allways a bit inferior?
Have to lil exp with the real genetics, and only experienced headaches from people wanting to strech to a 2 harvest in 1 season, cause the story allways failing :))
lots of claims. most obvious to anyone skilled in the art.
looks like they did the work though (screened 100 plants at 45,000 SNP’s)…
3 Likes
For sure on the screening. We’ve done the exact same thing and found hundreds of markers on chromosome 1 of auto flowering plants (including two in the same specific region as their candidate genes), but thought an attempt to file a utility patent on an entire chromosome (as they did) would be pretty lame; they get scientific kudos for ID’ing the genes for sure…but it will be interesting to see how this one plays out over the next 20 years relating to claims and enforcement thereafter.
3 Likes
So they did ID the genes responsible for autoflowering? Is there a related paper on their genetic work? Id love to read that.
Have they actually “knocked in” the autoflowering trait to a target plant through GE?
There is always going to be some “genetic drag” when selecting for a trait (drag = neighboring genes in that same area of chromosome). So yes, if you did GM in only those specific autoflowering genes, you would have no genetic drag and a true strain with only the autoflowering trait added… assuming those genes are not also responsible for the “wildness” of ditchweed.
I’m all for it
These production technologies and ip will never be for more quality it will always be more more weight.
I hope these type of technologies experience exponential growth in the next decade to further differentiate corporate cannabis from craft cannabis.
2 Likes
Ah, it looks like all your claims were rejected by the examiner - must have been a hard decision to abandon 
What did they actually steal that were the crown jewels? Genomic data without the plant itself (and all the phenotype data) is nearly worthless. Patsy, do you understand how genomic data is actually used? My understanding of it is that they can’t really do anything with that data even if they wanted to. Maybe Seth can explain the utility of the 2,000 SNPs of data they supposedly stole - he seems super knowledgeable about genomic data considering he made triploid plants (congrats on that!).