Dude…wish I had the time to fully elaborate. We buy seeds from all over the world. We get as many S1s as we can from anyone who is doing decent chucking when good traits are present (we don’t just breed for cannabinoids). Any inbreeding is good inbreeding from a trait / chemical standpoint when searching for needles in the haystack. Once you find a trace amount of WHATEVER compound you are interested in, you self pollinate that plant. Then you grow out the progeny, test, them, and repeat with the best of the best for the compound of interest. Over and over and over. Every day. Every year. What we found to produce CBG was most likely a random mutation (i.e. a single nucleotide polymorphism–they happen in cannabis every 100K bp or so in a genome that is roughly 1 billion base pairs). Varins can be found in every day varieties, but it require many generations of inbreeding and testing to lock-in this very wild condition.
It’s a fuck ton of work. Trust me, I know. Eric is going bald and my hair is getting gray. We work our asses off every day because we love what we do and it helps SO many people. What you are saying is the equivalent of interviewing Damian Lilliard and being like “So Dame, you mean to tell me that you DID NOT ENTER A CHEAT CODE before you started shooting from the logo? I mean c’mon, no one has ever achieved that through persistence and hard work…we’ve never seen anything like it. Where’d you get the code?”.
It’s real. Welcome to the revolution.
–EDIT: Don’t disparage Dave. You obviously have no appreciation for cannabis history or those who went before you. Dave founded Hortapharm in the Netherlands, brought in his friend Rob Clarke, and hired a staff that included Etienne de Meijer. Collectively, they worked land race varieties (whatever that means–it is meaningless to me in post-colonial era, but my Ph.D. is in sociology so I’m jaded) using a GC to find trace amounts of compounds of interest, then inbred to lock those compounds in as the dominant cannabinoid when possible. They were marvelously successful and sold the resulting plants to GW Pharma in the early 2000s.
Yes in short to your question in paragraph 1. Paragraph 2, more difficult. You are talking about a 2 nucleotide substitution in a 1648 base pair gene off of what would normally be an active THC synthase. If someone has the same gene in their plant, our utility patent would supersede them from using it commercially. The chances of that happening unless it was a knock off of our work…greater than lottery odds. Yes, there are multiple ways of achieving pure CBG plants. Other methods are described in scholarly papers since 2009–ours is unique, which is why we protected it.
And to whoever posted about “Matterhorn” above…I’ll buy everyone posting in here a beer if it turns out that plant has a different gene than our work. Don’t make assumptions about flower timing if you don’t know the breeding background; the utility patent people were getting pissed about a couple days ago that we filed on is what makes our varieties flower predictably early, not the location that it was developed in.
@seth misunderstood, i understand that now that youve explained basically (1) it was what you first said about 10,000+ plus plants tested and/or of inbreeding of s1 tested (thats what i assumed just wanted to hear it haha) (2) my statement about the turning on/off genes --that was in regards if it wasnt option (1)
helll you never know once CRISPR hits cannabis… people are surprised about that still nowadays when my microbio teacher warned my class of crisper 7/8 yrs ago and its unseen risks. -off topic.
i 110% appreciate the work you guys do and the ones before, i just cant appreciated fully without proper understanding… and now i do thanks
there were two. on the off chance you’re referring to me
developed in/developed for/left to evolve for 20 generations in…
in your case early flowering was deliberate. it makes the plants better suited to our growing season. given the latitude at which “matterhorn” was “developed”, early flowering would also be advantageous (presumably more so), and a decent breeding program or even a long term laissez-faire “landrace” production would be expected to produce earlier flowers.
if they’re using your synthase allele, then chances are they’re only a couple of crosses in, and one would expect considerable phenotypic variability from seed.
the chance of hitting the same spot repeatedly varies depending on the mutagen. if you’re looking at mistakes in repair or infidelity on the polymerase, then there is actually a slight bias based on sequence. if you’re looking at transposon induced mutations, then you can repeatedly hit the same spot if you’ve got a critter that preferentially jumps to linked sites sitting nearby.
there is also data suggesting that even without said linked starting point, hitting the same spot is likely to occur due to target site preference
We planted in early to mid july. Got it tested first week of october and harvested till damn near november.
We didnt go hot growing BOAX. We came in at .25% THC both from the state and from my r&d lab in october. Some farmers were hot in Michigan, but nobody i know personally. Way more people dealt with rippers
ionizing radiation has given us most of our commercial apples…
we really should be using EMS on pollen if we want novelty in any reasonable timeframe…(betting GW uses it).
although personally, I’m a big fan of insertional mutagenesis
The DB confirms we have Mu & Spm in cannabis.
I’d say there was even decent evidence that THC synthase was derived from the ancestral CBD synthase via the insertion of a tourist element (although I don’t have that alignment lying around at the moment).
i love the UP. retired from milwaukee area (retired teamster) and moved back to the land of 10000 lakes. are you growing this year and if so, what did you decide on? the seed i bought from oregon last year was disappointing to say the least.
We’re still deciding on genetics, most of our grows are in WI. My advice to people is worry less about the strain, and more about finding an honest breeder. For the UP and MN, the strains that finish in Sept are probably best. Something like Early Remedy or Early Bird might work.
trying to do that. drain the swamp! the rats come up from underground during a flood. same thing happened in the seed industry. i’d love to see the tar and feather method come back into play. i’d like for some goon squad show up at these guys doors with a drum of tar and big bag of feathers and a shit eating grin. . lol that would be hilarious. can you say shunning? will you let me know please what you decide…
This not really about the fear of strange mutation of the modified organism itself. It is about all the ecosystem respond to these changes as we spread them all arround. We are already very bad in controlling plastics and many other synthetic chemical compounds or processes, we also did some mess with gmo. This is not agood idea to upscale yet. But research is ok.
Of course, research should be done prior to scaling up. People who are smart enough to successfully modify a plant generally aren’t scaling up before they do all their research. More freedom to do research is exactly what I’m advocating for.
As of now, it is legal to do diy biology in the united states. If things continue to keep going at the rate they’re going, people who do diy biology will be more and more restricted from doing this type of research. If the US government had their way, it wouldn’t be happening at all. I don’t think research should be limited to huge corporations.
And I’m not saying everyone needs to modify their plants and put them in natural populations, but the implications would be just the same if we let an artificially selected strain re-populate in nature.
Keeping it in the hand of a few powerfull evil mind, it is bad indeed. It should belong to everyone. But it needs to be highly controlled anyway, and left in the hand of qualified and controlled people in controled environment. Letting anyone mess whith such thing in its own corner is not a good idea, some as for nuclear power or climate control…
The fundamental problem, as in many scientific breakhtrough , is that technology progresses much too fast for our society, too fast to wisely integrate them.
