Episode 50.66 ft Ryan Lee of Chimera Genetics - 16/11/20

Hello and welcome to the next episode of the podcast, a cannabis podcast for budding enthusiasts. This episode we are joined by the fantastic Chimera of Chimera Genetics. Hope you guys Ready for that 3 out of 3 hitter wrap up this epic 6 hour chat with a bang. As always, a big thank you to our fantastic sponsors. Seed tier now. Best seed bank in the game. Guarantee on satisfaction, not just germination. Why would you go anywhere else? They've got all the biggest breeders in the game. Fire from Swamp Boys, Skunk, Va Mean Jim. You name it, they got it. Likewise, check out Coppet Biological Systems, your number one stop to get all the goodies to keep your garden happy and healthy. Be it beneficial predator bugs, beneficial microbial powders, or even feeds to keep that beneficial army alive, happy and healthy and make your next harvest the best today. Likewise, a huge shout out to the Patreon gang. You guys are the lifeblood of the show and truly help to keep episodes happening. If you would like to support the show and continue to ensure that more episodes come out, as well as get access to additional content, unreleased interviews and some other bonus goodies, go check out www.patreon.com the podcast. I hope you guys are excited for that final three out of three part hitter from Chimera. Let's get into. A lot of people over the years have expressed concern to me around the idea of the development of such a strain whereby, you know, it's, it's approximately the same height, structure, profile, terpenes, it's got all these traits on lockdown such that, you know, like a big combined harvester can just harvest a field of it perfectly and it just goes through to production. That sort of idea and the, the fear that gets expressed with this sort of end outcome is that we could lose genetic diversity if these populations were hermaphrodite or to put pollen out, that sort of thing. Do you think that that is a legitimate concern or do you think that it's more akin to the way there's corn and then there's heirloom corn and you know, they both still exist.

Genetic diversity for me is a concern for every species on the planet. And so cannabis being one that I've chosen to be a custodian of. Hell yeah. Genetic diversity is a hugely important thing and I think that everybody needs to practice good. We need to be doing open population whenever I do a population. For example, when we did the blueberry stuff with dj, we grew all the stuff and we just let it open, pollinate. We didn't do a lot of seed from it, but we let it all get a little bit of seed and all that seed got bulked together and it's like, now you've got everything and that goes in the freezer somewhere or a fridge somewhere or whatever, into your long term germplasm storage. And then you start working from the clones of the individuals and creating subfamilies. But the first step is the open pollination. The first step is the preservation of the genes in the pool, because it doesn't stop you from doing any other type of breeding downline. You might want to open pollinate the whole thing and collect all the seeds from all the plants and then you've got it all again and you don't have to do that for another 25 years and then you can take the one clone and make seeds from that one plant. Now you've got an inbred version of your population and the breadth of the genetic diversity in another population in the fridge. Right? And I think that's a crucial part of, if you're serious about germplasm preservation or genetic preservation of a crop, that's what you do, right? You preserve it and then you improve it and you put the preserved stuff in the freezer and then you can improve the line and then if you want, you can go back to the original population or cross the new line to the old line or whatever. Your options are limitless. But if you didn't do the preservation, you can't go back.

Right?

So, yeah, hugely important for all plant breeders and definitely people need to be start thinking about it. Is making uniform seed going to compromise the genetic diversity of the species? I don't think so, because again, you might be able to make that new line where all the plants look the same with a small subset of your population. But as long as you've got that genetic diversity that you've preserved in the first place, you're not really losing anything. Right.

Sure, sure, sure, sure. Just to jump back, one question, you raise a brilliant point, and one, I've actually kind of struggled to navigate the minefield of myself in that a lot of people in the community use the incorrect sort of nomenclature around certain topics. And my suspicion is that it arises from the fact that a lot of growers are genuinely very inquisitive and curious and so look into things and often, you know, words get used in the wrong context because maybe there was never like a formal education around what it's used. And, and often it leads to just people like myself using the wrong terms, just so that people can kind of understand what we're talking about. The question becomes, do you think there ever will become a sort of formalized nomenclature around cannabis and, like an effort to set it straight? And the reason why I specifically reference this is because we're seeing a shift with seeds. Instead of being called S1s, people calling them R1s. And whether that's correct or not, it makes me realize that people are starting to think about this sort of thing. What's your thoughts?

What's R1 reversal. Yeah, well, that's silly because. That's silly because It's A. It's S1 means self. Right? So, yeah, yeah, you have to. To. You have to reverse one plant. But that plant that you reverse doesn't make the seeds. I think that's a weird thing to call it S1S. And. And it's actually kind of funny. I think it's actually a good way to. To make this point. The cannabis world kind of likes to be on its own. You know, you asked. The question that you asked was, will we ever get to a standard point in time where everybody uses a strict set of terminology that's correct? I mean, there is a whole strict set of terminology that's correct. And the rest of the plant world uses it, but for some reason, stoners don't. Right. And it's no fault of our own. Like when. Listen, when somebody teaches you something the wrong way and we all learn it and we all think that it's right, and then all of a sudden, one person learns that, hey, we all learned it wrong, it's pretty hard for the rest of the people to come back and turn around. So words like strain sativa indica, like all those words are used wrong. I even used it earlier. I used the word calyx. There's no calyxes. Cannabis doesn't have calyxes. Cannabis has brax. Right. But again, and I'm not blaming Rob, but Rob in marijuana botany, he misused some of these wor. And he learned them the wrong way as well. He was taught them the wrong way. I'm not trying to put any blame on Rob for this. Let's dive into the sativa indica thing for a second here. Let's start with indica. Indica means from India. There's other plants that are from India, and they're like medicago indica, for example. Indica means from India. Well, if you look at plants from India, the cannabis plants from India, what are they like? They're equatorial. They've got long, thin leaves, right? But we call those plants sativas. Well, sativas sativa means useful or cultivated. It's Latin for it's kind of got a bi meaning it's like useful or cultivated. Peas are pissum sativum, Right. And again, that sativum is the same root word which means useful, right? So somebody had taken a plant out of that collection and found a use for it, really is what it is. They cultivated it out of the wild. It's kind of like the process of taking it out of the wild and putting it into your own domestic cultivation is. Is what the word sativa means. Well, the plants that we mean, the plants that were first described by Linnaeus as Cannabis sativa were hemp. It wasn't drug cannabis, it was hemp, Right? And hemp plants have narrow leaves and really tall stems. Okay, so what are the wide plants then, with the wide. The really short, stocky plants with the super wide leaves that we call indica? They're actually Afghan, so they're Afghanica. So what we call indica is really Afghanica. What we call sativa is really indica. And sativa is really meant for hemp. Well, that might sound all interesting and everything, but how the hell are we going to get everybody to get on board and understand that that's what it is? I mean, even yourself, you're a highly informed person in the space and we still use these terms, right? And I'm not trying to make you feel bad or dumb about that. It's like I run into this every day with people, right? It's like everybody I interact with, it's like, oh, this is a sativa. This is a strain. The word strain. The plant people that do the naming of plants in the world, they kind of oversee. There's like another organization that kind of develops the taxonomy and the names for plants. They don't use the word strain, right? Strain is simply reserved for bacteria and viruses, right? So you can have like COVID 19 is a strain, right? And it's the reason it's called the coronavirus that we call Covid. The reason is that it has that name, is that all individuals within that family that came from a common ancestor, since it spread all over the world, it's undergone all these mutations in its genes. So it's actually no longer one individual genetic type reproducing itself. It's become like a hairball of all these different genetic types that are reproducing themselves. The reason that we all call them the COVID strain of Coronavirus or whatever is that they all induce the same phenotype in humans.

Right.

Which is the coronavirus disease or Covid. So really, people that are using the word strain should stop. It would be my recommendation what you refer to as a strain, like, for example, Blue Dream is a specific clonal type that has been selected from a population, and every plant that subsequently comes from that clone or from other mother plants of that clone, that should be called a cultivar. Okay. Cultivars don't necessarily breed. True. But as long as you propagate them through clones, the traits that we refer to that, you know, the traits that we named or somebody has named Blue Dream, all of those traits are consistently. They consistently come from the plants. As long as you're taking cuttings of it. Okay.

Yeah.

If you then cross that plant to itself or one member of its family and all the plants came out again identical to Blue Dream, that would be called a variety. So a variety is a seed family that reproduces a type when you inbreed it through sexual recombination. A cultivar is a plant that maintains its type when you reproduce it through clone. Okay. And so I think cultivar is the word that people mean when they say strain. And there's probably not enough true cannabis varieties yet for that to really be too, too relevant to most people. Pinot Noir, for example. It's a clonally propagated plant that's a cultivar. It's not a strain. Like you'll never hear. I mean, you hear it occasionally, but the plant people would never call it a strain. Right. Yeah. And so that's kind of why I lean away from words like indica and sativa. And I try to tell people, or I try to use the words. All I can is set an example by using these words myself. And I kind of try to use the word equatorial for what you've been referring to colloquially as sativa. And then afghanica, I think, is the best word for indica. Again, Linnaeus, the guy that did this work, was whatever, over 100 years ago. Well over 100 years ago. And then when the drug cannabis growers started getting into cannabis and call it the late 50s or maybe 60s and 70s, that's really when the words sativa and indica appeared in our pop culture vernacular, or even our cannabis culture vernacular. And it's pretty understandable that they went and read the scientific literature and decided, oh, look, this plant is tall and it has thin leaves. It's probably sativa, without realizing that that Linnaeus was describing a hemp plant Not a drug. Cannabis plant, right? And same with the indica, right? So really, it becomes hard when everybody is using the words to mean different things. It's again, it's like we're talking with terps and we don't have a consistent, agreed upon definition, right? Everybody's got their own definition of what these words mean. So someone says, oh, I got a strain of cannabis. And it's like, oh, yeah?

Well, what.

What's a strain? Ask them what a strain is. And it's like, watch them try to figure out what it is. Because a strain, a strain, when it reproduces, it should always reproduce the type. But if you breed a cannabis plant to itself, and it's a cultivar, it's a hybrid cultivar, when you breed it to itself, it falls apart. The kids no longer look like the mother. That's a real problem in the seed market because some dude gets a cutting. Again, we'll stick with Blue Dream. Some dude gets a cutting, a Blue Dream, and he's like, I'm gonna make a bunch of money. Or here she thinks, they're gonna make a bunch of money making seeds from Blue Dream. So they take one copy of the clone and they reverse it with their STs and take that pollen and put it on their. Their other plant. And then they put, they harvest all the seeds and they put them in a bag and they label it Blue Dream, right? And those seeds go off to the seed vendor and he puts them on his website and puts them in a package that says Blue Dream.

And.

And when you grow the seeds out, they look nothing like the parent. The word Blue Dream becomes meaningless because again, then that goes out onto the market. And some guys, he finds a plant that's totally different from Blue Dream, and he's selling in his market as Blue Dream. And now the public has no idea what Blue Dream even means. If you go into a grocery store and you buy a Macintosh apple and you're in Vermont or Australia or like London, UK or Amsterdam, it's the same apple, right? Because it's been registered as a plant variety, right? And they get that when you, when that process happens, that's when you get to put the name on the plant and you get the commercial rights to the plant and the name, right? Some other dude can't come along and start, like, selling an apple in his backyard as Macintosh, because eventually everybody gets to know the flavor of the Macintosh and they realize, yeah, that's Macintosh, that's Granny Smith, that's Honeydew. And people learn these things. Unfortunately, we don't have that kind of standardization in cannabis. And you actually have to be of a certain level in the business with access to lab testing and a bit of a snob, like a sommelier kind of snob person, to really understand the differences and be able to pick up a plant and say, that's this, this is the other thing, and sort them by chemical type. I like to complain about these things, but really the only reason I complain about it is because it needs to become a talking point before people are going to do anything about it. You have to have something. That was one of the things that I did when we were dirking down in California. The company that was working for gave us really quite significant budget to go and buy all the weed that we could find in the state and run it through our lab. Through the process, we were able to start seeing, okay, everybody agrees that this is Sour Diesel, except for these people. They've got something else they're calling Sour Diesel. The entire market agrees that this is Blue Dream. Except for these people. They've got something else that's Blue Dream. You can start linking a chemical profile that, that is discoverable by a lab assay. That means the type, right? And a good way to think about it is like if Tom Cruise has kids, we don't call them Tom Cruise and start telling everybody that the kid is in Top Gun, right? I mean, it's like, it's just that we all agree that the words Tom Cruise or whatever word you want to use is a symbol for a type. That symbol and that type should remain constant from group to group for it to be a real thing. Otherwise what people are doing is they're just trying to slap a popular name on a different variety to sell it and fool the market. But really what that does is it just confuses the market in the long term and then nobody knows what anything is. It's one of the shortfalls of cannabis. Maybe I'm way nerding out on about it too much, but I think it would be really great if everybody understood that this certain smell profile is Sour Diesel. This certain smell profile is what we call Blue dream, right?

Yeah, 100%. And some really good food for thought and little something I'm going to have to keep in mind going forward trying to use the right terminology because I'm definitely a huge advocate of. That's how things get very muddy. You know, I've. I've certainly told a lot of people when they make some S1s, you know, make sure to say that it's an S1, you know, like otherwise you have that same problem you mentioned. But just to jump back to something we were talking about earlier with the the AE77 Cali Orange, I just wanted to ask. There is this prevalent idea that exists broadly around, I guess all orange strains, but maybe it stems from the Calio because it is so widely used and it's like, you know, a common ancestor for a lot of the popular ones at the. You've worked with it and you've made the Kalazar and the C. In your experience, do you think that there is a link between that orange profile and a lack of potency? Because a lot of people speak as though you just can't get like an orange flavored strain that hits you in the way an OG does. What's your thoughts?

No. Well, no. Yes and no, probably. I think the long answer is no. And the reason is that like I kind of mentioned to you, off recording scent or smell is a heritable characteristic. Okay. And so it's a trait like anything else. And it's probably a series of traits that all appear as one. And usually when you have traits like that on a given chromosome, they kind of get stacked in one part of the chromosome chromosomes. During copying, they break apart and they can switch. Remember we were talking about the blue and the red chromosomes before from mom and dad. When that child from mom and dad it's making sperm or eggs or pollen, those pieces of chromosomes can actually change little pieces of information. So you might get majorly blue chromosome with a little tip of red and correspondingly a majorly red chromosome with a little tip of blue. And so they do exchange little pieces of information. The probability of those genes that are inherited on that same little chunk getting separated. Like the closer two genes are on a chromosome, the more likely it is that they'll be inherited together. Okay. Because there's less chance of a crossover happening at that part of the chromosome between those two genes. But it can happen. Okay. It's just really low probability. And so when you say is THC and orange, are they linked to be that there is no thc, there's no higher potency orange stuff? That's really not true. But it takes a lot of breeding to get to that point. And. And that's a phenomenon called gene linkage. And so people can look up on Google gene linkage or even on YouTube. I'm sure there's videos gene linkage and gene linkage maps. And there's ways that you can, if you score traits over many generations and you very diligently record the traits and the occurrence, the number of times those traits appear on a set of plants on the population. You can actually start to figure out how close together sets of genes are on the chromosome. Okay. And if you're using genomics or molecular techniques, you can actually do it a lot more quickly. But the idea is that you want to. So it might be that the orange flavored genes are very close on the same chromosome to a version of the THC gene that doesn't work very well.

Right.

And so what we need to do is we need to take that gene, piece of the gene for the orange, sorry, the piece of gene for the mediocre THC production and switch that out for a gene that makes thc. But it's very effective at doing its job. And that's called breaking the linkage. The closer two genes are on a chromosome, the harder it is to break the linkage between those two alleles. So, again, these are all things that can be solved with plant breeding, but it really takes doing like a cross. You want to cross, probably you'd want to cross something like an orange plant to a high THC plant, like cookies or OG. And then you grow the F1 and you let them all breed together. And in the next generation, you want to grow like say 50,000 plants. Right. And when you grow that many of the next generation, you have a higher likelihood of finding the plant that has all the orange flavor, but also the high THC production or the high cannabinoid production. And that's just plant breeding and numbers. Right. Like Luther Burbank used to grow hundreds of thousands of plants looking for. I think he, you know, I think he selected the russet potato out of like 100,000 plants. Right. I think that he kept two plants from 100,000. So.

It'S impressive.

Yeah. And it's a chore and it's serious. But it's like, man, you want to make those improved plants. That's what you do. And now when you've done the work, now you've got an orange plant that is high in thc and that's pretty cool. But it takes a lot of work to get there, and you certainly can't do it in the closet. Now that we have genomic tools, they can definitely aid in the breeding to do that. But they also have a cost. Right. You're still paying however many dollars per sample to have every plant genotyped. So, yeah, the good news is that the new ones, like some of the sherb and the New things, they're orange and they're a lot more potent than the AE77 is.

Yeah, certainly, certainly. So we actually had a question from one of our viewers submitted about, like, what are your thoughts on the occurrence of like the supposed, like one in a thousand fenos? And specifically they kind of referenced this idea of every now and again, for the most part, you'll see most plants having just lots of characteristics of the parents, some blended, some leaning more towards one or the other. But every now and again, maybe you call it a one in a thousand feno, so to speak, you get a plant that's almost unlike either of the parents in any regard. Do you feel like this is a real sort of phenomenon that occurs or maybe it's pollen contamination? And do you think these one in a thousand fenos will be more sought after, given we've kind of discussed them a bit and how there can be advantages to finding these special occurring plants.

They can be better than the others, but they're not necessarily better. I think when people are talking about the one in a thousand, it's really most often about, you know, it's like you said, you get traits from mom and traits from dad, but like, did you get all the right traits from mom and all the right traits from dad? Right. That's one in a thousand kind of material. The other thing that you might see, I think what you're hinting at is there are these very rare genetic combinations that lead to an alter phenotype of some type. And the reason that they're rare is that again, it's really with breeding, it's again, like I said, it's statistics and math. It all comes down to just having the right genes. And if you have all the right combinations of genes, then you can get an aberrant or a stranger, a new phenotype that was unseen in either of the parents. But that all is based on probability. Right. And it's really just rolling the dice over and over and over and over and over again until you get the right combination of genes together.

Sure. And I mean, seems like a good point to segue into some of the more advanced science and IP stuff we're going to chat about. The first question I have in regards to genes and the way they line up, do you, to the best of your knowledge, know if CRISPR or any kind of molecular editing has been used to create altered cannabis varieties?

I don't believe so. It might have been done somewhere in some lab, but CRISPR is not as easy as everybody thinks it is. You don't just dip a plant in CRISPR juice, for example, and the whole thing comes out changed, right? Like, these genetic changes, they happen on a single cell, right? And then that single cell has to have integrated the new trait, and that single cell needs to become a new plant. And so when that single cell divides and divides, you have what are called. When you get a clump of cells, you get what are called sectors in the cell. And those sectors might actually, like, you might lose the CRISPR mutation or whatever the CRISPR change has caused. And so now you've got a plant that is growing as a chimera. Like, it's actually a plant with multiple genetic types within the plant. But what you need to have is a plant that is all one genotype that all incorporates the new CRISPR mutant version of your altered gene. And so when you grow. How do I explain this? When you grow cannabis plants, like the shoot that comes off of a plant, it's not a single cell. It's an organ, right? It's not one single undifferentiated cell. It's like all the cell types are already organized in a way that they know what they're doing, right? So the equivalent to people can think about in humans, if you've got the cells in your heart are heart cells. They're heart tissue cells. The cells in your lungs are lung tissue cells. The nerve cells in the back of your eye are eye tissue cells. They're all highly specialized and differentiated. Any cell type can revert to what we call stem cells. And plants have equivalents of stem cells, which is more or less callous. It's really like a dedifferentiated cell. It's a cell that started as an organized group of tissues. And it. So if you do that and you get it down to the one cell now, you can make your CRISPR changes on that one cell, but you have to grow it back out into a full plant that is redifferentiated into the proper types. Okay? And that doesn't just happen spontaneously. Like, you have to. There's protocols with different chemical and hormonal applications that you have to get that you have to go through to redifferentiate a stem cell. It's like, you know, it's like if you want to take a stem cell from someone, you take cells out of their skin, you put them through a genetic program, and it makes them back into a stem cell. Now it's like the progenitor cell that can become heart tissue or eye tissue or lung tissue. And so depending on what you want that cell to do, in the end you have to coax it along that genetic pathway so your little baby stem cell grows up to be a heart cell. And then you can take those heart cells and coat them on some kind of matrix so that they grow into a piece of tissue that you can actually transplant into a heart. For example, you don't want to put lung cells into a heart. Right. And so there's a whole science that nobody has figured out, to my understanding, that nobody's figured out in cannabis to really go through that process of single cells to differentiated tissue. Secondly, when they go through that process of redifferentiation, there's something called somaclonal variation. And again, you can look that up. It's soma clonal S O M A and then the word clonal variation, and that's genetic variation or epigenetic variation that stands upon the genotype and that can actually through something called DNA methylation that can either silence genes or overexpressed genes. And the result of those things may be that the plant that actually comes out of that form of tissue culture is not the same as the one that went in, regardless of the genetic change that you made. So I think that for now, listen, it's going to happen. At some point in time, somebody will make crispr cannabis. I don't believe it's happened yet. Typically you make those kinds of alterations in species that are already mostly ideal, but you just want to fix one trait and there isn't the natural genetic diversity that is present in the species. For you to be able to go back and select those traits through breeding, it's a shortcut. It's a really cool technique. It's super neat that we can. That we're at the point in time that we can do that now. But I don't think that anybody has to worry that that's happening with cannabis at the moment. It will come one day, but I don't think that we're there yet.

Yeah, what a really comprehensive answer. So if we jump to the other end of the spectrum, as opposed to maybe the experts using genetic modification, let's talk about the novice for a second. What would be your advice to someone just starting out on the right way to breed? What would be any tips or sort of principles you would recommend they adhere to?

Genetics for Dummies. I'd get yourself a Genetics for Dummies textbook. Understand a basic plant breeding textbook, or even a basic biology textbook that teaches meiosis. Meiosis is the dance of life. That goes on, like I said earlier, in the forming of the cells that become sperm, pollen, eggs and ovules in plants. And that genetic dance is more important to the breeding process than anything else, because if you understand how it happens, then you understand what's possible and what's not possible. Once you have that knowledge, you can add on cannabis knowledge on top of it, and you only become more informed. But the vast majority of books on cannabis don't do an adequate job of talking about it. Rob Clark's book is not bad for it. It's a pretty good start. You have to remember the context. I say it's not bad, it's an epic book. But I say it's not bad today because it's 2020 and that book was written 39 years ago. It was published in, in 1981. So the amount of things that we've learned about science since then is pretty vast. And a lot of those things are kind of left out of the book. So I don't talk bad about Rob's book because it fails, because it's not a good book. It's a great book. It's got a lot of science from that time period and our perspective on breeding from that time period. Start off with basic plant breeding. Do yourself a favor, just read the first 10 chapters of a plant breeding book, then go and start really digging into cannabis. And I guarantee you that it will make your cannabis breeding that much better, because you'll understand how you can do things, what you can do and what you can't do. And those are important things to know. I mean, you have to know plant breeding is about getting from point A to point B. You have to understand where you are at point A and know where you're going to point B. You don't just get in the car and start slamming the gas down, right? And close your eyes and hope that you're going to get to your destination. And that's kind of the way that we've been breeding cannabis, if you can take that as an allergy.

So a really good answer as well. I think probably do everyone, even myself, good to brush up on that sort of thing. So the next question is, we commonly hear people discuss this idea about how breeders of years gone by, maybe people working in the 90s or even earlier, it was. It's commonly discussed that, like, they just had such good stock to work with. But then on the counter end of that argument, you hear that, well, maybe they were just better breeders, so to speak. But part of me thinks that's well, there wasn't as many breeders back then. So it would be weird that like there was such a high number of breeders that historically have been considered to have done some pretty good work. What's your thoughts? Do you think that the stock was better or that there was some interplay of skill involved?

No, I don't think either of those things. I mean, there's good plant breeders then, there's good plant breeders now. I think the stock that people were working with back then was probably less refined, not better. There was probably more dogs in any family, any seed population that you, you'd grow. There's probably more subpar plants than there are today because again, the people that are breeding today, they get to benefit from all the good choices that people made in the past. And in the past, it depends on how far back you go. But I mean, we're talking like 70s. At that point in time, people were really using what I would call like more close to land race or indigenous or region of origin populations. And like I said before, those types of genetic material, that type of genetic material is usually quite. Is a lot less refined. And so you have a lot of, a lot more, less desirable traits in those populations. So things like intersex, you were talking about, you know, for example, Tai, a lot of people know that Thai has got intersex plants. And David, I spoke a lot with David about Thai because he's probably done more Thai breeding than anyone I know. He used to go there and collect seeds and then bring them back and do a lot of work. He said that 95% of them were just trash. Tall, weak potency intersects. If you're growing a few thousand Thai plants and you're only going to find, call it less than 100 that are even potential candidates, that's a lot of work for not a lot of reward. Also, tide doesn't yield anything. It's a tiny little sparse plant. If you grew 2,000 plants and you're not yielding very much, that's also not a very good use of your resources. There's a reason that we don't grow those plants anymore. I know that there's specialists that like to go back and small home growers. I think that that's fantastic. I think it's great that people are growing those things and still playing with those plan. Even if you're just crossing and stumbling around, the chances are there's a possibility at least that you might stumble into something good. But I think from seriously going to work a line like that, really it's Nice, because Thailand is just about to legalize medical wheat cannabis. And it's like, you really want to go back to Thailand and grow 200, 300,000 plants looking for the one, right. When I talk about cannabis and genetic resources, it's like we have some painful steps that we have to do through those processes, but that would be a terrible thing to have to do, grow 20 acres of plants just to find the one, because they're not going to yield anything. So from a commercial perspective, it's kind of like, how do you convince your investors that that's a good idea? But if somebody does it and they do find the one plant that is just epic, for whatever reason, for whatever set of trades, then, yeah, at that point in time, we move forward from that new starting point and then things get better. And corn, apparently, I have some corn breeder friends too, and they tell me that corn kind of went through the same thing. There was a lot of times where there was a lot of crosses with all these different corn varieties. And again, the vast majority of them were dogs. They were just terrible populations. They didn't taste good, they didn't yield well, they didn't have good mold resistance or crop protection traits, all that kind of stuff. But once you go through the hard part of purging all those negative traits out of the population, you're actually, you end up at a starting place that's much better than where we are. And once we get there, we'll be able to turn cannabis into that type of crop like we were talking about with corn, where you can plant seeds and they all come up looking, you know, I call them bulletproof plants. They come up, they're perfect, they got the perfect chemistry, they got the great yield, they've got all the proper resistances, they're all uniform, you know, everything that a true crop producer could want. Right? Like, I think that's really what a plant breeder's goal should be, aside from the discovery. And right now we sell breeders, typically in the cannabis market, sell the variation as a feature, not a flaw. Do you know what I mean? It's not really. If you're growing crops and you're a farmer, you want to plant all the seeds and they come up looking the same. If you plant thousand seeds and all the plants are different, you're not going to be very happy, right? Because then you got to go and do all that phenotypic selection and you lose all the uniformity in your crop, which is a pain in the ass for many, many reasons. From harvesting to Marketing to everything. And so we got to get to that point in time where we've actually bred the plants to be reliable seeds so that you can plant a crop and the farmer can know that what is on advertised in the description is going to come up in the field.

Yeah, really valid point there and some kind of often under considered kind of points you raised there.

It's a shame, but it's just part of this evolution and you know, everybody wants to be a breeder. It's like a lot of people think that like, okay, I've been growing for five years so now I'm a breeder. And it's like, no you're not. It's a totally different set of skills. Yeah, you got to be a grower to be able to appreciate the minutiae of the characteristics of the plant and look and understand what you're seeing. But really, if you want to breed a breeder, go learn how to be a breeder. It's not hard, right? It just takes time and it's a set of heuristics that you have to understand and methodologies that you have to understand. It's not difficult stuff to grasp. It's not like you have to be some super special crazy person to do it. You don't. But you do have to put in the time, you know, just like you don't pick up a guitar and then like start touring with Metallica, right?

Yeah, very good analogy. And I mean on the point of being a good breeder, a question I always like to ask the guests. What are some, if any attributes you look for in a male that you think are a sign of quality or will help help with the project?

Well, I'm going to flip it back right to the same thing I said before about males. I think males are a detriment to breeding drug cannabis because they don't match the morphology and the chemistry that the female plants use. So you know, I am really doing a lot more work these days on I'll do preservation run. If I have a population and I do a preservation, I'll open pollinate it using the male. And then I select my females from. Once I've open pollinated the males, I know that I've got all the genes from the plants, right? From the entire population. You cross all the males to all the females. That's what's called an open pollination. And all the genetic diversity is then preserved. That goes in the freezer or the fridge. Then you take your females and you start selecting, like I said, for traits of interest on any given size of the cross. So you asked me, what are important traits? I'm going to put it back to you and say, what are important traits for you? Right? Flavor, yield, potency. I'm not going to say potency, but cannabinoid profiles, because you might be selecting for THCV and against thc. It's not all about the drug, or at least the thc, the recreational drug. There's all these other compounds that really have important potential medical uses. If you identify that compound in two female plants, you cross them together, and now you've got a population that's more likely to have that trait in it. And then you can start adding in stature or morphology or plant architecture or flavor or color or cannabinoid profile or whatever it is, Resistance to powdery mildew, resistance to molds, resistance to pests. All of those types of traits, especially the last three. They're impossible to breed for in closets. You just can't do it. You have to be grown on a field with disease, pressure and selecting plants in the environment that you're going to be growing them. And I think that those kinds of traits, like the things that are really important to growers, have kind of been left out of the agendas of plant breeders because, let's face it, everybody's been chasing flavor and potency, right? Really above everything else. And I think even you look at the basic architecture of some of these, the plant architecture, I call it, or the stature or the structural morphology of the plant. You look at some of these new hybrids coming out of California, and their statures are terrible, right? Like these plants, you have to support them. You got to stake them. You got to grow them in nets because they can't support themselves with the weight of the flower. The stems are all tiny little thin things that you put them in a room with any kind of powdery mildew issue or greenhouse, and they're turning the powdery mildew and mold. So all those traits that have been ignored, we really need to start breeding for those things. Because again, from an industry, there's two sides. And I call them. I look at them as competing interests, but I call them growers plants and smokers plants, right? The plants that the grower wants to grow are typically not the plants that the smokers want to smoke, right? Because they've kind of got competing interests. The grower wants the big one that's bulletproof. You know, it's. It's mold resistant, it's powdery mildew resistant. It can doesn't matter if mites bite it. Like, it just keeps going. It's got these big, thick leaves or whatever the traits are that keep the mites at bay. And the same with like root aphids or anything. I mean, we could be talking about any part of the plant here, but that's really what, as a breeder, you need to deliver a plant because they're your customer. Your customer is not the smoker. Your customer is a seed purveyor, is the grower. You need to be serving his agenda. But also his agenda is to have a marketable product that he can sell on the market. If you give him a bulletproof plant that sucks to smoke, you're really also not doing him any flavor. Neighbors. Right. So it's really about balancing the wishes of the goals and the growers versus the goals of the smokers. And ideally, you can create a plant that caters to both. That's a lot of work. And I don't think that there's any plant breeders on the planet really with cannabis that are at that point yet where we've got plants that do both. Again, prohibition has kicked us in the teeth over the last 40 years. 50 years, we haven't been able to make any profit progress. 60 years.

Right.

We haven't really. If you look at the genetic progress that crops like wheat and corn have undergone in the past 60 years, they're light years ahead of where we are because we just haven't had. We've been kept out of the system. They wouldn't let us play in the game. Right. Every time you tried to set up a row, the cops would show up. So in the UN and the United States are running around the world paying people to cut down all their weed. It's been a pretty hard time for cannabis for the last 60 years.

Yeah, undeniably. So. I think the next question, admittedly, is one of those ones where it's like a kind of like a how long is a bit of string question. But a lot of growers and breeders often ask the question, what is sort of the minimum number of seeds you'd want to run through to feel like you had a reasonably good idea of what was in the gene pool, so to speak. And so I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

Well, it depends on the number of traits that you're chasing. When we would do a crosstown in California, the minimum, we have these nursery trays that are called 72 cell nursery trays. It fits in a 10 inch by 20 inch standard nursery tray. And it has 72 cells. And we would start those. And that's enough to get a good. Excuse me. A good initial look at the population. And depending on what you see in that, you might find an incredible plant. You might even find a plant that's a bre. You might realize that the population sucks, or you might decide, let's grow another 10 times what we grew or another 5 times what we grew.

Right.

But I kind of feel like I'd like to do more, but just because of this is a good size for starting. It was an easy thing to put in our production system. So it's not ideal, but it's a pretty good idea to get a good idea. You got to remember also, most people are breeding from like 3, 5, or 10 seeds, not 100 or 72 or, you know, 500. So 72 is a lot better than we've done in the past. That doesn't mean it's close to ideal, but it's all about being able to move your project forward and balancing with, you know, the resources that you have available. It costs money to grow plants. It takes time. There's an opportunity cost to growing plants because you could be growing other plants. Right. And truthfully, I got so many populations of seeds, it's like I'm never going to get through them all. It's about prioritizing them. And sometimes you make across, and you're like, well, that was great, but now I need to grow the next generation of those plants. And the stuff that's in your vault waiting to get sprouted, you know, you don't even have a chance to go back to it, because every time you grow a new line, you might add a new population or a new project to your goal, your set of breeding goals. So, yeah, 72 was what we were doing. It was a good start, like I said.

Yeah, that seems like a pretty. Pretty nice number to start with for sure, dude.

It's far less than is ideal. Like, I'll tell you that right off the bat. I mean, and I want to grow 1,000 if I could, but 1,000 plants sent to the lab at 50 bucks a pop, that's a $50,000 bill, right? So it's probably worth more than the crop is worth. Right? So, you know, it's all about balancing your resources, your space available, and your priorities. And there's no magic numbers.

Yeah, yeah, I understand. So we've been alluding to it all episode, but time to get into it. Some people may or may not be aware, but you were involved in the first case of cannabis having a patent on it. I'd love to hear how you got involved in this initially.

Yeah, well, they weren't the first patents involving cannabis. They were the first utility patents involving plants. And truthfully, I had nothing to do with the patent side of it. I worked for a research company and I did the plant breeding and the IP development. And the patents came from more or less the lawyers of the group. There's certain things that I can talk about that's been publicly disclosed and there's unfortunately stuff that I can't because I was under contract with these folks and I signed a non disclosure agreement. But yeah, there was patents done on work that I did on these plants and my name is not affiliated with those patents at all. Again, people get really freaked out when you start talking about patenting plants. These weren't patents on a specific plant. They were patents on the use of a specific plant. It might seem like splitting hairs, but it actually has a big difference. Plant patents per se, like specific plant patents, are only really valid in a couple of countries, one being yours and the other one being the United States. So Australia and the United States are, I think, two of the only global justice systems or legal systems that actually recognize patents on plants. In Canada, they don't recognize patents on higher organisms. Although you can patent the cell of a plant, which is kind of bizarre. So if somebody has a plant with that cell in it, I guess you can in some way try to enforce intellectual property rights on them. It's pretty difficult. Everybody's heard the story about Monsanto going after this poor organic farmer that grew seeds and his seeds were contaminated by Monsanto. The story that most people don't understand, which is the truth, was that this farmer planted his soybeans right beside Monsanto's crop that was next door. And he went and actively collected all the seeds from the plants right along the border and then grew those plants and subjected to them. Those plants had a gene in them that caused a resistance to a chemical, an agricultural chemical called glyphosate or Roundup. And Roundup is a herbicide. It essentially kills plants that don't have this specific gene in them. The gene came from a bacteria and they put it into this plant. And then once the plants had the gene, they became resistant to this thing. So Percy Schmeisser, who was the farmer, somehow the media really painted him as a bit of a hero. This poor organic farmer against big old bad Monsanto. And don't get me wrong, I have no love for Monsanto. But the truth is, the matter was, is that this guy actively went after using their genetic technology and he wasn't growing organically. He exposed all those seeds to this agrochemical and then in the process, he essentially stole their ip. He took the gene and he went to court and he lost. But somehow in the media that became, oh, this poor organic farmer, he was being bullied by the big guy. And I think that that's probably a bit of a narrative that was created because there's a certain segment of the population that's against genetic modifications. And the way that we do genetic modifications now compared to the way that we did them 20, 30 years ago is really different. We've become. Back then, it was probably closer to doing surgery with a Japanese sword rather than a scalpel. And nowadays we're very, very skilled. We have all these new technologies that allow us to go in and create specific changes to DNA, like you were talking about Heavenly with crispr. And those things kind of are just by the wayside. So anyway, I think, just to clear it up, I think there was a lot of people running around online saying that I was patenting all the world and I was trying to steal the whole world. Stranger truth is, I had nothing to do with it other than breeding the plants. My name's not on the patents. I don't get any intellectual property rights from them. I don't get any royalties from it. I really have absolutely nothing to do with it. And I don't work with that group anymore and I haven't for a number of years. So, yeah, it's just kind of a funny thing. I was really. I started working with the group because they were quite patient focused. And I had an opportunity to have someone build us our dream lab to really start screening large populations of cannabis in a way with high, what we call brute force, chemical breeding. I mean, it's like I said, it's expensive to grow a lot of plants and then send every single one of them to the laboratory and have full terpene and cannabinoid. And we also looked at other chemicals as well that influenced smell and flavor. It was a learning experience for me and I really enjoyed it. There were some good folks in the group and we created some really cool plants that had unique chemistry. CBDV, THCV, you know, CBD, type 2 plants with altered cannabinoid ratios and really interesting terpene profiles and all that stuff. Was able to go to a series of dispensaries and companies that were growing it. And it was really, really a lot of fun. And it was really gratifying to be able to create these, you know, these plants that we'd always talked about and deliver them to patients. There was a few people in the community that were pretty upset about the idea of cannabis patents being granted. And they did a lot of effort to create a narrative where people thought that we were trying to steal the world and nothing could be more further from the truth. The only things that were patented were new, unique combinations of cannabinoids and terpenes that had, that didn't exist before. Like, they were new plants. Right. They really were new inventions. Right. And when we did that, I guess the lawyers for the group were like, oh, we need to protect these things. And I think that that's also a thing that, you know, people kind of want to say it's unfair that you can patent a plant or a life and it's like an organism that occurred in nature. Well, dude, these things didn't occur in nature, right? Like, these plants are not, you're not going to go into any population and find a plant with this set of chemistry. They just don't exist. They're new. And you don't spend many hundreds of thousands of dollars or more doing research into any kind of technology or plant or breeding program, or you're designing a new computer or whatever it is. It's like you don't design, you don't spend money in research and development. If the people that are paying for the research and development can't get a return on their investment.

Right.

That's just the way it is. And patents aren't the only way, like we said, that you can get intellectual property rights on plants. There's these things called PBRs or plant breeder rights registrations. Through UPAV, which is the Union for the Protection of Plant Varieties, which is a global organization that like I said before, kind of oversees the intellectual property matters of plants. If you spent 15 years to make a new Apple variety, and let's just call it again, Granny Smith or whatever, you should have the rights to reap the commercial rewards for a period of time. And part of that system exists that, yeah, you get the commercial rights, but you have to make the plant variety available to any other breeder in the world, and they can take that variety and use your work to make something better, that better plant. Even though you have your commercial rights for 20 years or 15 years or whatever it is, depending on the jurisdiction, it might be in five years somebody's created a better variety of yours. Anyway than yours anyway using your work. The reason it's set up like that is so that humanity benefits from.

You.

Know, it's a communal development where the whole world gets to benefit from a new technology. Yeah, you might come up with a new technology and you get some rights to a few years to use it, but everybody else in the industry also gets to take it and then start using it in their own breeding programs. It's kind of a trade off. Anyway, it's a funny thing because I had death threats online about it, right? And it's just bizarre, right, because it's like, it's like read the patent, my name's not even on it. Like I really have nothing to do it. I don't get a penny from it. And you're threatening my life because of some perceived notion that somebody took something from you which couldn't even be further from the truth. It's like.