Part Two - The Past, The Present, And the Future of Cannabis Breeding

Hi there, friends. Shango here from Shaping Fire with part two of the Segra International Cannabis Breeding panel that I went and asked them for. After seeing it, I watched it as a web streaming thing and I, and it was so good that I reached out to them, I said, hey, can I, can I have this for the Shaping Fire audience? Because they'd want to see it as well. And they're like, sure, we'd be honored. That'd be cool. So here we are. And so if you missed part one, I recommend that you check that out. They are kind of nice to watch in order because it gives you more of a historical timeline, but really you don't have to if you don't want to go click to the other one, just watch this one. It talks about different topics and is also really great. So the official title for it is the Past, the Present and the Future of Cannabis Breeding, Part 2. And the panelists are mostly the same, same top, top notch, premium folks in Ryan Lee that most of us know as the breeder Chimera, Rob Clark, who's the godfather of cannabis tax and botany, Mark Lewis of Napro Research, whose cultivars keep on winning Emerald cup awards. And then Mohave Richman from Bio Agronomics Group, who's new to me but adds a lot of real good value to this panel. And all these folks are just really top notch and hard to like, get, you know. So the topics on both have all been cannabis breeding, but specifically what we're going to talk about or what they're going to talk about in this episode is modern breeding technology, modern breeding innovations like autoflowers and polyploidy, and then what the competitive landscape is right now in, in breeding. So it's all great stuff. I hope you enjoy it. And here we go.

So our panel today again for part two, we've got a great group of guys here to chat with you today. We have Michael Williamson from Catalyst BC and also Allele Genetics. We have Ryan Lee with us from Chemovar Corporation, Rob Clark and Mohave both from Bio Agronomic Group, and then Mark Lewis joining us from Napro Research and the Biotech Institute. And I think we've got some good geography covered today. We've got Michael in Florida, Ryan in bc, Rob in Sweden, and then Mark in Mojave and myself down here in California. All right, so with that, I'm going to turn it over to Michael and he's going to take this away for us.

All right, good afternoon or good morning or good evening, wherever you May be. Thanks for joining us. Let's jump into it. So the first question that we're going to be tackling today is how will cannabis plant breeding objectives evolve as the industry matures? You know, we're interested in kind of exploring concepts around trait optimization as well as things like pathogen resistance. Mark, you want to kick us off.

There.

Or Ryan.

I guess this sounds good. Yeah, I got it.

Sorry about that. I guess to know where we're going, we kind of need to know where we've been and be really cool. If we could just take like two minutes and have Rob kind of talk about what they used to trait optimized for in these landrace varieties and then we can kind of spring off from there and talk about what we're optimizing for now.

Well, I think from the point of view of traditional farmers who develop landraces, landraces being geographically limited and culturally limited varieties of plants and animals for that matter, that were evolved within a certain environmental context and within a certain cultural context. So it was the physical environment, the weather, where plants lived every year and combined with what the farmers wanted from those plants. So basically what landraces were, were survivors. There was nobody out there looking for a particular trait. It was a balance, it was an evolutionary balance that manifested itself every year through the planting of seeds that were sexually reproduced from a male and a female plant in the case of cannabis. So there wasn't the searching for traits like we do now. It was an ecological balance that came between a farmer and the environment and the interest that cultures had in those local plants. So now we changed everything immensely. But those are the building blocks we started with, and that's where we'll go on from today.

Yeah, I think that that's good. But you think about grain size in the hemp plant, if they're being grown for seed, you, you know, every year you pick that plant that had the biggest seed and you sprout that biggest seed so that, you know, you're optimizing that, that fruit size trait. And then you have in corn, it's drought tolerance, of course, and nowadays in cannabis it's, you know, you either got the fiber, which you don't want branching, they, you know, long stalks, the big seed for your grain crop. And then the big focus now is chemical optimization. You got hemp trying to reduce the amount of THC below federal guidelines while creating metabolite concentrations of other cannabinoids in the, you know, high 18s and 20s, so you can efficiently extract a large amount of metabolite to be used as a therapeutic somehow. Um, the next iteration of this, I'm sure we'll get more specific for different processes and methods of extraction I.e. water, hash or sieve filtration be by trichome head size, color. Mohave. You know, you, you always talk about purple flowers, right? You know, any, any good examples of someone optimizing that purple trait?

Yeah, well, purple is. Purple is a highly marketable trait. I would just add that, you know, in that land race selection period of finding those survivors that there was a lot of, because everything was so isolated, there was not necessarily a selection towards a chemical profile, but there were certain chemical profiles that survived. And all throughout the world in those isolated regions, we had a lot of diversity in the various compounds that the plant was producing. So that's, you know, in. As we move forward, we have to kind of look back to the past before this hybridization event that happened over the past, you know, 30, 40, 50 years and start to explore how those chemical profiles, those chemovars were established within those landraces and how they facilitated certain needs for that particular population, that region. Those various traits that were kind of isolated. But yeah, purple, purple. I mean, my thing with purple isn't so much, you know, it's just that it's funny that color has become such a powerful marketing tool, especially here on the west coast. That kind of goes beyond the effect of the plant. It's just, it's such a powerful tool. Color and smell.

Pathogen resistance would probably be obviously the next attack for trait optimization. I know Ian likes to talk about that a lot, if he's got anything on that.

Yeah, I mean, the way I look from a plant breeding perspective is that like any trait exists on a continuum. I know I said, I think I said it on the last one, but you know, you can have small plants or tall plants or low yielding plants or high yielding plants, or same with cannabinoid and terpene content. You can have low expressors and high expressors. So when you, when you look at any trait, there's this continuum of performance that we see. And in cannabis especially, like I think even much more than a lot of other plants because of the way that it naturally evolved. It has all this built in variation that we can, you know, we can take advantage of as plant breeders. Unfortunately, one of the things that we did over the last kind of 20 years is just reshuffled all these different decks from all over the world and intermixed them and kind of ended up with like, you know, this big, colorful mess of genes, which in some instances has been good, but it really hasn't allowed us to, like Mark saying, optimize some of these traits or, like, you know, push the most of any given trait that we can see or even, in some cases, create. You know, it's called transgressive segregates, like plants that are even farther out than, you know, the limits that we've seen before in terms of, you know, any trait, yield, smell or whatever. And so, yeah, you know, there's a lot that we can do this plant, but we definitely have to create more inbred lines and, you know, some of the kinks that we've created in interproduction plants, things like root architecture or root chemical performance or, you know, plant architecture, like Mark was talking about before. All these things add up when you're in a production environment. I mean, like Rob was saying, you're growing these things. These plants came from farms that were grown from indigenous or like, most wild farmers are up in the mountains. They weren't being, you know, produced in the way that we grow them, either in indoors or in greenhouses from clone. And so we have a lot of work that we can do in terms of plant architecture and structure, in terms of just making the plants easier to grow and harvest and process.

And, Ryan, how far out do you think we are from, like, I always refer to it as like a utopian plant. It seems like, you know, people come across cultivars all the time that have one, two, maybe three really desirable traits, you know, and they kind of refer that as, like, it checks this box, it checks that box. But in terms of, like, maturation time, it seems like there's always, like, if it's a fast flowering cultivar, I notice, like, it generally sacrifices yield on the back end or something, or it's slower in veg for some. Some reason. But I guess how far out do you think we are from having through without any kind of gene editing, more of a utopian plant that kind of checks literally all the boxes. And let's say there's seven of them.

Yeah. Okay, I'm going to look at it. I'm going to answer you in a way that has nothing to do with what you said. It's like, imagine you're coming into the west coast on a boat and you got to transport. You got to go over all the mountains and end up at the prairies or end up at the east coast, right? So when you start up the hill, it's like you're looking at the top of this mountain, and you can't see anything beyond the hill until you get to the top, right? And then when you look down over the other side, you can see that there's a whole other mountain range and a whole nother set of challenges that you have to face. And that's kind of the way that I look at plant breeding. Like, it's this goal that's never done. You're. You're embarking on a project that never done because plant bulletproof plants that we're gonna make over the next 20 years. You know, we're gonna come along and find some flaw that we've bred into the plants, because that's just the way that plant breeding goes, right? Every time you make a grow, you make an adjustment to the performance of some trade. You might have fixed one problem, but now that allows you to see a whole new problem that you couldn't see in the plant before. So for me, like, I don't look at plant breeding in that. In that way. Yeah, plant never stops, right? It never stops. It always goes on and on. And it's this funny pitch that I, you know, unfortunately I have to have with investors because it's like they want to understand. It's like, you know, the investor mentality is that you want to hear, like, if I put in X amount, it's going to return me, you know, it's going to give me an ROI of whatever 100% or whatever it is. And when you tell them that it's this ongoing expense that's always going to go. It's painful for some CFOs to understand when they're thinking of cannabis like it's a widget, right? But the truth is, that's what trade optimization is about. And this is one of the key areas that really hasn't been addressed in my opinion, in the cannabis industry is that area of true innovation. Right? There's all this stuff that you can do in extraction and processes and delivery methods and, you know, skew formats and all that kind of stuff, but it always comes back to the plant, right?

And.

You know, in terms of trade optimization, you know, Mark's talking about grain size or chemical profile and, you know, these are important traits, of course, but you can essentially, you know, we could optimize hemp for hemp crete production or, you know, the production of. They're using it for five hemp fibers for graphene. You could probably breed a variety that makes really nice graphene, right. As you know, as we all know now, we can optimize the cannabinoids and the terpene contents and profiles. But really any, any trait in the plant we can optimize for a given purpose. So, you know, once we do seed size, maybe it's seed profile, right? We start having different hemp seeds with different chemical profiles in them as well. So, yeah, there's a lot we can do.

I mean, well, can you name, can you name a perfect tomato plant right now? I mean, go to the store and buy them. You know, they're grown. There's a perfect plant for that hot house or, you know, for windset farms or whoever it is trying to produce a certain amount by a certain date to make their money. But that's not the most desirable tomato for, say, the consumer. I mean, there's, there's much tastier tomatoes than the pink hothouse ones. Right. But there's reason that they're specific for particular, you know, production schema. Continual innovation in all plants. Potatoes, you know, what makes a better chip, what makes a better french fry, you know, all that stuff.

I think from a commercial standpoint, there's, you know, you see it pretty consistently and it's, it's. People are, there's some leaps and bounds that need to happen with the plant in terms of like labor reduction. You know, there's this kind of obsession with touching the plant and manipulating the plant. And you know, it could be things like, can we breed something that has like enough turgidity that it doesn't need to be supported by a trellis? As an example, is there something with like that perfect balance of leaf to calyx ratio in some of these other kind of areas where, you know, especially on the disease resistant side or pest resistant side, you watch a lot of people just dump time and labor into crops. And if we could get the genetics just a few steps above, it would really kind of help out the farmer. We tend to touch this plant too much. It seems like if we could get some of these breeding building blocks established, maybe we could touch it a little bit less, let the plants kind of do the heavy lifting for us.

And that's a really good point. Sorry, go ahead, Molly.

I was going to say that that's a really good point because, you know, as Mark brought up, you know, we can go to our local nursery as hobbyists, plant growers, and we can choose between all these amazing plant varieties. But when you go to the grocery store, there's only usually a few tomato varieties to select within any one market. And that has to do with optimization for the Farmer for production. And I think that one of our challenges moving forward as we're able to develop these varieties is we have to have a starting point. Like Ryan said, got to get over that mountain before we get to the plateau. And as we're exploring marker assisted breeding or triploids or all these new amazing ways to develop these new varieties, you have to have a starting point which.

Is.

What are the base building blocks that we're going to go on to move from there. And I think that one of our challenges that we have in the industry is that there's a lot of diversity in the market and not as much diversity in the genome in terms of colors to choose from and blocks to choose from. So once that diversity in the market thins down a little bit, similar to that diversity at the supermarket, then we can really optimize those varieties for different production techniques for different, you know, for different traits like turgidity and all that stuff. So it's really challenging. I see. As the market continues to shift and the new strain du jour shows up, then that strain is now the new starting point. And then a year later, there's a new strain that's a new starting point, variety or cultivar. I think that collectively, as an industry, we have to search a little bit deeper into what we want these plants to produce in terms of compounds or in terms of products, industrial materials, before we can really start to optimize their traits.

Well, and the problem with being an innovator is that if you have these really great products to genetics to go to a farmer, you're five or 10 years ahead in your vocabulary and how you speak about the plants. You know, you talk about type 1, type 2, type 3. To a normal farmer, they just kind of shrug and say, how much THC does it produce and what's the yield? They don't really even care about terpene profiles right now because they're not. The market hasn't been educated enough for the level of sophistication to be high enough to even realize or explore these different, you know, chemo types. That's just the chemo type trait of it as well.

I guess.

Just kind of. Sorry, go ahead, Ryan.

Let me just get this in A lot of these traits that we're talking about as well, that have kind of been judged, you know, especially in the cannabis cup circuits or Emerald cup or whatever, it's all done on flavor and perception, right? And so those are all important traits that appeal to the consumer, the end consumer. But typically, plant breeding, especially Plant breeding for agriculture is done with the, you know, the customer and client for the breeder is the grower. Right. It's not the end consumer. By corollary, the end consumer is also the customer. But really like the plant breeder serves the ag industry and not the weed buying public. Right. And so I think a lot of the breeding that's been done on the small scale with people making crosses and winning cups, like, you might end up with some, like, you know, some special plants that taste pretty good. But I don't think these are going to be the plants that are the bulletproof plants that we end up with in cannabis.

Right.

And it kind of brings me to this concept that I use sometimes, and it's something that we've seen really evolve the last 20 years. Is the industry going from like growers plants to what I call smokers plants. Right. So, you know, OG would be a smoker's plan or a cookies would be a smoker's plant. Like, everything about the plant in the essence is really in those, in those plants is guided towards the consumer. You know, they're really finicky to grow and they have a small yield, but the smokers really want to have those plants. Whereas, like, you know, something big, like the old hash plants or the, you know, the big bugs that all the, you know, the biker folks used to grow back in the 80s, and where a lot of our hash plants kind of came from, the emphasis back then was on yield, right? Because it was like any pound that you could grow, you could sell for big bucks. It didn't have that level of connoisseur quality that appeals today. That's something that's going to really happen is that I think that we're almost kind of hitting optimization for those smokers plants, like the plants that the consumers want. But really what we need to do is make those plants into more robust versions of themselves. The needs of the producers, right? Like I said, again, plant architecture, like you said, Michael, their ability to stay rigid and tall and self support, right? Anything that can save a producer time and money, labor cost, the amount of leaf that you have to trim off a plant, you know, all that kind of stuff makes a huge impact. And obviously when we're talking about pests and pathogen resistance as well, like, those are all traits that benefit the grower, not necessarily the smoker. Right. And so I think one of the things that we're definitely going to see is those kinds of traits being developed using like molecular techniques and QTLs and that kind of stuff.

Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. And it kind of ties really nice into the next question, which is, what are the modern ag tech tools and innovations available to cannabis plant breeders? You know, oftentimes we think of tools as a physical, tangible thing. And now we're starting to talk about digital tools in sharing data, you know, across borders and things like that, where we couldn't share certain other elements before due to regulations. Do you want to touch base a little bit on some of the marker assisted breeding and some of these tools that you were just referencing?

Yeah. So genome sequencing and biotechnology really has really opened the whole book up for what we can do, animal life or plant life, but it's more accepted in the context of plant life making crosses. We're just mating plants together from within the family and ending up with whatever outcomes. But we can do all sorts of things to the plants to make that process much more efficient in what we're doing. And now that we've sequenced the entire cannabis genome over the last 30 years, people have been working out what all these different genes do in Arabidopsis and these model plants and corn and barley and every other major ag crop that we can think of. And we've begun to understand these genes. And just like in the animal kingdom, those genes are conserved or shared across all different types of plants. So, you know, like, for example, the genes involved in harvesting sunlight and photosynthesis, obviously, like those genes are conserved across all plants. Right.

And.

So as we've begun to, like, you know, figure out this big hairball and learn what these genes do across all these different species, now that we've sequenced the cannabis genome, we're starting to get all of this information and understanding about what the genes in the cannabis, you know, both the genes that are unique to the cannabis plants and how we can learn about and play with those genes, but also how we can take our knowledge from other species about like, for example, powdery mildew resistance or resistance to botrytis.

Right.

And how we can actually use the lessons that we've learned in other plants to make some better breeding choices in cannabis as well. Right.

Right. And that's kind of how you find, if you already found pathogen resistant gene and hops or another species, you can see if that happens to be conserved across through to cannabis as well and, you know, use the same sequence and look for it. I believe that. Didn't someone do that, Ryan?

Oh, I'm not sure what the work is correlated with the hops, but yeah, a lot, like I said, a lot of These pathways are, they're conserved all the way across. So for example, there's something called polygalacturonase, which is a gene that's involved in a whole bunch of different things. But you know, it's something that can be. Certain funguses, when they attack the plant, they can produce more. This thing essentially helps break down the plant. And so we can. Certain plants have These, they're called PGIPs or polyglacteronase inhibitory proteins. And you know, certain versions of these genes or certain plant lines have more copies of these genes, more resistant, you know, for example, you know, botrytis scenario, gray mold. So anyway, the point is that yeah, we can look for these sequences. And again, like I was saying before, it's one of those kind of the special things about cannabis. You know, a lot of these selfing species like tomatoes, they don't have, they've gone through these genetic bottlenecks that they made them much more easy to breed within themselves and remain true to type. But the way that cannabis breeds, like I've said before in the past, I think I said it on the last episode, cannabis breeds more like humans. And so if you look at humans for any given trait, eye color, hair color, skin color, height, you know, there's again, there's this vast continuum of performance across any given trait. And that, that, that's happened because humans have gone all over the world and mutations, they happen, they just happen within any given genome, right? And that becomes a marker for like a mutation event that happened in one place at one specific time. And all plants or people that descend from that mutation are going to share that common trait, right? And so over time, like the branches on our family tree, they change, they have all these little, you know, changes and variation. And cannabis is full of these little changes all the way across the genome. And so, you know, I think in the context of how we're going to use this information to make better plants in the future, it's all fine and dandy to have these fancy tools. But really, like for example, for the gws, the molecular screening or, sorry, the genome wide associations or GBS genome genotyping by sequencing, we have a lot of discovery work to still do to understand what these genetic variants mean. We've all seen with the COVID thing, again, I think it's kind of like a great. Everybody's having this public lesson of biotechnology, but everybody was what a variant is now, right? And so you can kind of think of the cannabis genome is that every gene has a variant and we need to understand what those gene variants mean in the context of the plant. And then we kind of need to catalog all the different variants and that is. And then figure out how we put them back together in different ways. Right. To. To yield genetic outcomes that we want. Which is really what we were doing with the chemical analysis breeding program with Mark and I doing down in California. Right. Is we were using the lab to screen for these chemical variants and then selecting those plants and using them for screening and creating new families. Right. And combining them in different ways. And it's the combination of those different sets of gene variants that leads you to get CBG or thcv.

Right.

Or CBGV is a good example because it's those two previous ones put together.

So beyond the fact that there's a ton of discovery to do as growers and breeders are making new discoveries and collecting more data, how do these tools help support things like IP protection? Or do they help support things like IP protection?

Yeah, it's another way. Does someone else want to take that one? Mark, do you want to take that one?

Sure. You know, a perfect way to create a bulletproof plant would be, for example, to really tap cannabis's potential by. Let's see, cannabis has the olive tolic acid pathway. So does something called streptomyces. You use streptomyces to. To essentially brew anti cancer chemotherapies like bleomycin. If you could crispr in a nice gene to follow that olive tolic acid pathway, have the cannabis plant creating real pharmaceutical anticancer chemotherapies in the trichome. That would be like a bulletproof plant. Almost as similar as how the roundup ready gene is distributed across multiple plants. Monsanto could certainly do that with cannabis as well. I mean, in theory.

Hey, Mark, would you mind maybe for some of the newer listeners giving kind of just like a kind of a gentle breakdown on marker assisted selection and kind of snip clips and kind of how those function in breeding.

Well, I'm definitely not the smartest guy on this call to do that. It's definitely Ryan and. But Eurofins and Medicinal Genomics, they recently launched a SNP tip for hemp and they'll provide, you know, the snip soups. I believe they provide the SNP sequences and Medicinal Genomics does a nice workup to help you correlate a trait that you might observe in the plant. And you could have a control plant and you could snip chip, you know, get the data for both of them, compare the data. And if you can find a pattern that correlates to your morphological or chemo taxonomical data, then you can use that marker to further your breeding program without, you know, growing your plant all the.

Way out or whatever.

I mean, like I said, Ryan's probably way better at breaking this down than I am because, like, yeah, Ryan, there's.

An interesting question that came in and it's. When will genetic markers be for intersex plants be available? And is this something that's possible? You can speak to that?

Well, there's. It's funny because we have all these different claims from companies. There's a Canadian company that's claiming they have a test for it, but, you know, they haven't opened. They haven't published on it, and they haven't opened it up to external validation. So it's kind of hard to really say they do have the test or not. Right. Eventually. Eventually we'll get there. There was recently a Canadian group, again, I think I mentioned on the last call that there was a group. There are last, you know, little. Whatever zoom panel. There's a group in Canada, I think, from ubc, and they just did a set of studies where they were looking at the genes that were turned on and off by spraying STS on the plants or. Yeah, STS on the plant. Sts, for those that don't know, is a chemical called silver thiosulfate, and it interferes with ethylene production in all plants. But in cannabis, that leads to the induction of male flowers on female plants. So essentially, they sprayed STS on the plants and then looked at which genes changed their levels of transcription. And so there's probably a good candidate set of genes in there related to obviously, the differences between male and female flowers. Right. And so we're gonna get some cues as the next few series experiments come out of that line of work. I mean, I can't really. It could be tomorrow, it could be, you know, five years from now.

Okay.

I don't know if intersex is probably. I don't think that's the most important trait that people are looking at. It would be really nice to understand. Understand the entire sex story in cannabis, but I think that there's other traits that people are chasing more importantly, you know, and that's something that we'll learn kind of as we go along. Sorry if that was a rambling answer.

No, no, it's great. It's an honest answer, you know, and we've had some innovations come out of some of these tools that have helped us kind of get to some of these goals a little bit faster, One of them being autoflower varieties and another being triploids. So I wasn't sure who'd be the best one to kind of start on autoflowers. I don't know. Mojave. Is that something you want to take?

Yeah, sure. Well, as we mentioned earlier, you know, autoflowers are a perfect example of a farmer innovation that, you know, people don't generally seek autoflowers for smoking. It hasn't been like the market hasn't been pushing towards autoflowers, but they open up a lot of opportunity for farmers. So, you know, there's been over the past few years, but a lot of improvement in the autoflower market. We're seeing plants that are getting close to what a consumer would consider desirable. Obviously there are a lot of amazing autoflowers, but they're not quite at what a traditional photoperiod plant does. But we're getting there. So that's an innovation that really, really was driven by a farmer's need to utilize different regions, different times of the year for production. And one great tool that Sagra has developed is they have a patent pending technology for actually micropropagation of autoflower, which is really going to have a lot of impact because as everyone knows with autoflower you can't hold the plant in vegetative state. So that's going to be an important.

Yeah, it's really interesting.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

We've seen a bunch of, especially in California, a major increase in people seeking autoflower seed. Maybe they don't quite have the infrastructure tools in place in their greenhouse. And so it's kind of an alternative for them. It's also a clean start in a lot of cases for them as well. Rob, can you speak a little bit of when we kind of saw autoflowers kind of come around and kind of what, what caused the peak interest in the early days with autoflowers?

Sure. Basically, autoflower is, in its correct definition, is a plant that's photoperiod neutral. That means that it flowers based on time, how old the plant is, how developed it is, rather than when the lights go on and off. So they don't flower because of long day lengths or flower because of short day lengths. Long night lengths is more an accurate way to look at it as cannabis. But flower whenever they reach a certain developmental age. And that means essentially that you put it in the ground and it flowers certain number of weeks later, no matter what time of the year it is. This has been sort of the holy grail for readers for a long time, the first person to really jump into this was Neville Schumacher, God rest his soul. But he. He tried this experiment with feral Hungarian varieties, which are very weedy and like wild plants, that they were escapes from cultivation. They're not really wild plants, but they've gone back to many of the wild traits, and that includes maturing seeds relatively early. But wild plants have a shotgun approach to survival, and that also means that those same plants produce seeds very late. If the season was abnormally long that year, they produce seeds that also matured quite late. So they had seeds falling off those plants to find themselves in a situation where they would grow the next spring. When those plants were crossed in with modern dope varieties, what you ended up with was varieties that never really matured. And with cannabis, drug, cannabis varieties, any cannabis varieties, whether you're after seed or the drug portion, you need female flowers that mature and finish. They don't just continue making seeds or trichomes and go on and on until they freeze to death. So that was the problem with the first ones. Maybe they were not truly autoflowers. Maybe they just had a different sort of trait that breeders in those days hoped were autoflowers. They met with no success. They dropped out of the picture completely for at least a decade. And then the new autoflowers came along.

And what year was this, for reference sake?

Oh, bad with my years. But I would say, well, Neville started his project in the early 80s, mid-80s, we didn't hear about. They were called autoflowers. They were early maturing varieties, early to flower, but they didn't really mature.

What do you say he called them? He called them Ruderalis hybrids.

Ruderalis is what he said was, yes, his germ.

They weren't really Ruderalis, but, you know, even. Even Ruderalis. I mean, Ruderalis wasn't born, you know, what's it called, like, the Jesus birth. He was like divine birth. It wasn't a divine birth. Right. But, you know, it ended up in Russia because somebody brought hemp seeds, cannabis seeds, to Russia at some point in time, into these northern climes and planted them. And the only plants that survived were the ones that had that phenotype that would start setting flowers from seed. Right. Or whatever, 50 days from germination.

Right.

And so when the early frost came, only the plants that would have had matured seed would have been genetic contributors to the next generation. Anything with a longer flowering period would have gotten wiped out. Right. And so it was really a big bottlenecking that brought that. Autoflowering is actually the one thing that makes it an interesting trait in the context of the discussion, I think, is that it's what's called a single nuclear recessive gene. And that just means it's one genetic mutation at a place on one chromosome. And if you have two copies of that gene, you end up with the autoflowering trait. If you only get one copy of that trait, you end up with plants that flower moderately quickly. And if you have no copies, then it's just a standard, you know, photoperiod plant or photoperiod determinant plant, which is really different from a lot of these other traits that we're talking about, like yield, you know, or even pathogen resistance. Those traits are responsive. They're called, like, polygenic traits. So it's really like the additive effect of up to, like, you know, 100 genes, for example, that all contribute together and add up little bits at a time to create what we consider, you know, a plant that's bulletproof in terms of pathogen resistance or yield. Right. You actually optimize yield to its highest point. And breeding for those kinds of traits is much different than auto flowering traits. Autoflowering traits are easy to track, even just as a visual phenotypic marker, obviously, because it's different flowering the rest of the plants. But you can also track it with molecular genetics. Whereas if you're trying to do that molecular genetics approach to a polygenic trait, it's much more complex.

Right.

Can we have a discussion around kind of like, I guess, like a ploidy conversation? So for everyone who may be not up to speed on stuff, can you kind of maybe give us a breakdown of polyploid versus a triploid and kind of. I know there's been a lot of noise in the news from the Crawford brothers over at Oregon cbd. They've got some things that they're releasing this year they seem to be pretty excited about.

I mean, the best example, in my opinion, for teaching about polyploids is looking at bananas, right? So bananas, the ones that we see commercially in the superstore or in the grocery store everywhere in the world, those bananas have three sets of chromosomes rather than two. And so the standard condition for most plants in most of their stages of life is to have two sets of chromosomes, like we as humans do. We have one full set of our chromosomes from our mom and one from her dad. There's a little breeding trick that you can do to end up with plants that have three copies, and it involves using chemical. Chemical Dunk essentially exposing a plant to a chemical. It inhibits the cells when they're dividing in a specific way. It blocks the formation of spindle fibers during meiosis. The net result is that when you cry, you can create. Has four copies of a chromosome of, sorry, four copies of chromosomes. And then when you breed that plant to a normal plant that has two copies of chromosomes, you end up with plants that have three copies of chromosomes. And there's a whole bunch of different things that can happen in the plant depending on the species. In bananas, the most important agronomic trait was that the seeds in the banana became, like infinitesimally small. So when you break a banana open and you look at it in a cross section, there's those tiny little black dots. You know, in a wild banana, they're not tiny little dots, they're seeds that would, like, really bother your teeth if you're trying to eat a banana. So through making polyploid or, sorry, triploid plants, we were able to, you know, destroy the ability for these plants to make seeds. And in fact, it's something that the Crawford brothers are saying has happened also with the cannabis plants, which is to be expected that they became almost sterile. Right. So these particular triploid plants, because of, you know, because they have three sets of genetic chromosomes in the meiosis process, or the formation of a gamete with a pollen and an ovary, you know, it doesn't work properly because there's an imbalance in the number of chromosomes and that leads to the seed dying. Right. Or never forming. But interestingly, you know, it also does other things because it gives you, rather than having two sets of genes, you can now have three genes. So it allows you to stack genes in a different way within a different. Within a given plant. And they're saying that they're having, you know, success and increased terpene and cannabinoid content, perhaps interesting new profiles because you can have, you know, rather than having an interaction of two copies of the terpene synthases, now you might have three copies of the terpene synthases that are all different and that, you know, theoretically could lead to some new phenotype that we haven't seen yet.

Yeah, that's fascinating.

Well, and also Dr. Richardson did this work with the watermelon, as you all know, the seedless watermelon.

That's the seedless watermelon.

Right, A triploid watermelon. And more recently, they use these techniques with maize to essentially skip 10 years of conventional breeding to get 100% homozygous. Plants that breed new hybrids. It's all the really non GMO corn can do to stay competitive. It's really interesting and it's kind of good technique because you get the double haploid. Pretty weak, but you know, that F1 is 100% homozygous. And if you get a fit population, it works really well.

The growers out there too. Sometimes there's confusion between like, mutation or fasciation and like, ploidy. Can you guys talk to some of the differences there that you see?

Yeah, that was. I don't know how those two got confused over world. Phyllotaxy, which is the number of branches on a plant, somehow got confused with the number of chromosomes in a plant. And they're totally different things. Like one you can see with your eyes, the other one you can't. Right. But somehow in the stoner lore, they ended up as the same thing. Polyploids, or better yet, aneuploids, are essentially variations that we can do. We can induce in plants on the number of chromosomes they have. So there's like, for example, there's wheat varieties that I believe are hexaploid. They have six sets of chromosomes. So, you know, if Cannabis typically has 10 sets of chromosomes in one, you know, single genome inherited from the mother. Like I'm talking about a genome in a pollen grain, technically, when a pollen brain and an ovary, you know, they fuse and you have fertilization from that point on the plant, we refer to it as its genome, but really it's two singular genomes, one inherited from mom and one from dad. Right. And so you can create plants with two, four, six or eight copies of those genes. And those are what we refer to as polyploids. And then you get into aneuploids, which are like, you know, you have eight copies of one chromosome but only seven copies of another, for example, or three copies of, you know, three copies of five chromosomes and a few less of other chromosomes. You're essentially adding or deleting extra chromosomes.

I know there was some excitement too with, you know, obviously we all know that there's feral hemp growing everywhere. There's people trying to grow hemp, and there's a ton of cross pollination happening. And it seemed like a lot of the excitement was around the potential for cannabis flower to kind of exist or coexist without being seeded by some of these new varieties.

Well, like Ryan said, the seeds didn't go away completely in the banana. And I'm sure you've seen a white immature Seed in a watermelon, I would have to say it's probably very similar.

Yeah, we'll get down significantly, but you know, seeds will exist or mutation will exist.

That's exactly the results we realized quite a while ago in Hungary back in the day. Taking finding true tetraploids, not aneuploids that had one extra of one chromosome or one less of another, but ones that were pure tetraploids with four sets of chromosomes, twice as many as a normal plant, and crossing those with diploids to make triploids, which is the watermelon strategy. I might point out for a minute that bananas were a naturally occurring triploid. It wasn't a product of breeding, this is a product of selection and cloning. Watermelons are a product of breeding. And we tried the same thing and we got exactly what Mark's talking about. You got those nasty little nubs that are actually just as unpleasant as a seed and you couldn't roll them out in a shoebox lid. They're just in there and they still taste nasty. And it's not what people want in their cannabis. Which is why groups haven't really moved forward with the triploids. Yes, they won't make a full on seed, but they still have a little shrivel ovule in there that is a seed precursor, let's say not pleasant.

Was that work done with over Hungary?

Work was done with Dr. Ivan Bocca in Hungary. Yes.

Cool. Yep, cool.

And you know, but for the hemp game it's genius. Right? Because what happened previously where the CBG was released, then the next year everybody had this heterozygous auto CBG seed that they were selling. But now you can't, if it doesn't, if it doesn't complete a mature A seed, well you have to buy the seed again next year. So it's, it's good for business. And if you're extracting and the seed doesn't form fully and get oils built up in them, then for extraction you probably have less, you know, byproduct from the, the hemp seed oil.

I know a lot of people want to jump to Q and A, so I'm going to kind of jump into this next question and we can keep it somewhat brief, but how will the cannabis breeding competitive landscape evolve in the coming years? Mohammad, you want to take a stab at that one?

Yeah. Well, hopefully it'll kind of move out from this fascination with pheno hunting through all these polyhybrids and move towards kind of a more focused attempt to Isolate specific lines and see what that can bring. Because we, you know, we. We know that there's. There's so much that cannabis can. Can offer in terms of its compounds and. And industrial applications. But I really feel strongly that we have to kind of isolate and start working on specific traits so that we can, in the future, make the. The hybrids that really, you know, work for specific applications. I mean, look at the. We're talking about triploids. You know, they had to develop the diploid versions of the. These F1s that they're releasing. You know, so that was a considerable amount of breeding. And then they had to, you know, had to find the tetraploid versions that didn't have a bunch of deleterious chromosomes that, you know, I guess it goes both ways. You know, everyone kind of thinks of triploids as being this amazing super plant, but it could also bring a lot of negative attributes as well. So it's kind of a matter of isolating and working at, you know, having a variety that is just high in a particular chemical profile and also has an advantageous trait such as structure, and working on that specifically so that you can create short plant high in limonene and a long, lanky plant high in terpenolene or whatever, and just have the ability to make a bunch of F1s from those. Kind of like weeding out the polyhybrids. I see that as being an important breeding strategy as opposed to trying to get as much into each individual plant. Right now, we're kind of obsessed with bringing everything in and throwing it all into this one individual cultivar.

But I think, yeah, cannabis. I don't think cannabis is ready for exploiting triploids and that kind of stuff yet. It's just. There's a lot of work that needs to be done still. Making plants uniform, stabilizing genes, even basic genes for color, flavor, or cannabinoid content. Every time you add another trait into the mix, things get much more complex. Right. It's like you're juggling more balls, but it's exponential. Right. Literally every time you add another trait that you're trying to maintain in a population, you have to grow more plants to find the ones that have, you know, the combination of all the things that you're looking for.

The balance. Yeah, it seems like, you know, with the triploids, they're saying, oh, well, you know, we're seeing increase yields, but they're also seeing increased botrytis in molds and mildews. You know, because the bud structure so Dense.

Well, it might not even be the bud structure. It's like that's kind of one of the things I'm talking about. Like, you know, look, everybody's growing these cushions. The cushions are extremely susceptible to powdery mildew, right? It's because they have a set of genes in them. They're, again, they're not optimized for resistance to powdery mildew. So when you take those plants and now you've got three copies of them, right? You've got three doses. Like, that's one of the things about triple eyes. Like you're saying it's like you get some good things. Mohave was saying you get good things that come along, but you also, any, any traits or any copies of genes that you have that are below par, right, below 50%, you're actually making the plant worse, right? And now you've got three copies of them in a plant, not two. So it's, it's one one. It's a lot harder to breed with. But yeah, it's like, it's like I kind of just feel like there's some more stabilization we kind of need to do in some of these basic, like house jeans, house keeping genes. I mean, it's like building a really complex big house on a tiny little foundation. You know, it's like at a certain point in time the whole thing is going to collapse. And just because of the way that cannabis has been left out of the agricultural improvement breeding scene for the last 75 years, which is when all crops have really made the leaps and bounds in terms of technology and improvements. Cannabis was kind of left to people breeding plants in closets, or at least it wasn't being done on a scientific principle. Cannabis did get left behind and there's certain consequences involved in that. And I feel like now we're trying to build this really complex structure, you know, multi billion dollar industry on a pretty shaky foundation. And we just need to do, we need to sharpen the foundation. You know, we got to do some of these basic improvements still and build upon that.

I agree. This is a question that kind of comes in and it's for all of you guys. Ten years ago, it was people like yourselves and people on this panel that are actually talking about terpenes. And now it seems like everyone's been talking about terps in the last couple years here from an individual perspective. Can each panelist please compare where we are today on the terpene front with where we were 10 years ago ago. And can each of you also please attempt to project in your crystal ball where we're going to be 10 years from today.

I can start with that. Where we were decades ago is where we are now. As far as the genetic capability to produce different terpenes, what we've seen is this hybridization of multiple landrace groups that brought together favored terpene suites from each landrace. And maybe the more technical breeders on this panel can answer this, but it seems to me to be a cumulative inheritance. The more terpenes biosynthetic possibilities, the more gene combinations, let's say, you throw in there, the more you see expressed. It's not really one overriding the other so much. Now, I think Ryan and Mark can address this more specifically, but what we've come up with is a real tutti fruity blend of dessert cultivars. And I don't see terpenes particularly lacking. I see varieties where terpenes are more predominant than one than the other. High terpenelline variety, high caryophylline variety, something like this. But all the other terpene terpenes are still in there. So where's it gonna go? I'm not sure. I'm not even sure the terpenes are exactly falling in with the. With the same inheritance traits that we find inheritance characteristics we find with other traits. It'd be interesting to see what other people want to say about that.

Yeah, I'll add to, you know, we don't even know how much is attributed to terpenes. You know, there's other aromatics involved that we're just starting to understand more about. There was a study just released just last week, I believe, proving the efficacy of terpenes in the entourage effect. I think that was really groundbreaking to really be able to point towards certain terpenes contributing to this psychoactive effect. Once we can isolate and understand more about which terpenes modulate and interact with the endocannabinoid system, then we could start breeding towards those goals. So we could have these foundational blocks that actually target specific conditions or specific traits that people find desirable in terms of effect. Because right now we know lots of terpenes in a cannabis plant are dynamic and have a lot of aroma and flavor. And people seem attracted to that just the same way we're attracted to other things that smell lovely. But if some of those terpenes are possibly getting in the way of the others, you know, kind of in a, you know, an antagonistic way, getting a better understanding of what actually needs to be in this plant for it to have this particular effect and then focusing the breeding towards the that particular chemical profile. And then we can kind of, then we can start to look at the variety improvement based off of we now know that this has these therapeutic properties that are very specific to this terpene cannabinoid ratio or these other aromatic thiols or who knows what else is contributing to the effect. Then we can kind of start selecting and breeding to combine effects to make these hybrids, these poly hybrids that actually do what we as breeders or as consumers or as farmers really want them to do, as opposed to just kind of throwing everything against the wall and saying these are really loud terpene profiles.

Interesting. Yeah. That paper that you just referenced, Mohave, I believe I read and they use four different models and two suggested the synergy and two were inconclusive and they were both non. Is that right? Ryan? Did you read it?

Yeah, I read it. They injected ridiculously huge equivalent doses of terpenes into mice and it's really quite questionable about whether you can even say like they definitely got receptor activation from some of those terps. But I mean there is 0, 0, 0 chance of you ever achieving those levels of terpenes physiologically. I mean you'd have to extract like I don't know, ten pounds and do it in one dab, you know what I mean? To even have anywhere close of the amount of terps.

Right. If you remember in ICRS was it 2017, Dr. Biro and I presented some cellular models for inflammation that showed that beta caryophylline and CBD had a synergistic effect to decrease the inflammation in certain cell lines. So we know that that's possible. And the dosage in that experiment was more realistic and true to type and was based on the guava jam and garlic jam, whole plant extracts actually. And that that puts, you know, a good timestamp on that scenario. But the original question was where were we 10 years ago? Where were we today? 10 years ago you smelled your weed to buy it, you didn't need to look at a lab report. Today everybody wants to buy the THC number. It's like with the Fido Facts rollout in California and SC labs, we're creating an industry standard packaging is now switching to have, you know, the top three color coded terpenes based on the phyto facts. The consumers getting more educated. Ryan and I both know from our experience that different terpene profiles with the identical cannabinoid profiles yield different experiences. So much so as I can fool many THC users with certain Hemp cultivars that we have in the stable. More importantly, once the consumer or once the genetic library is comprehensive enough, you know, and people can try all these things that, you know, Ryan and others have tried. It's like when you go to a store and you say, hey, I want the highest THC concentration. And then all of a sudden, thanks to biotech and other breeders, they say, well, we had. There's six of them at 30% THC. There's a myrcene dominant one, a pinene dominant, ocean dominant, which. Which smell, what flavor want. And, you know, alcohol is a good example. People don't. I mean, some people drink Everclear all the time, but even with tequila, it's like people prefer the flavor, and then that flavor translates to an experience. And because so much of the cannabis experience is set and setting, it's. It needs to be pleasurable. You know, if you take a lung full of anything and it tastes like a sack of dog poo, your experience is going to follow. But if you take a hit of something and you're like, oh, my gosh, this is amazing, your experience is going to follow. So there's this translation, and I think that's what the consumer is going to ultimately want, is something that tastes good and has a repeatable experience. And thanks to creating standards that make sense, like the color coding on the phytoprint on the Fidofax, it's like you can kind of create a language to communicate to the consumer that then can translate back to the producer and the breeder so that everybody's talking the same language and we're all communicating effectively and that drives purchase decisions and sales.

You're not going to need to do that at that point in time. You'll have the 5G chip from the vaccine directly with your point of sale for terpene optimization for your genotype. No, Yeah. I don't know what's going to be in the future. I mean, we've seen that the company from Israel has just taken hold in San Diego. There's a company that's just moved down there that's got a license for the technology to use crispr. So that's definitely going to be coming to the market pretty soon. And that's going to bring a whole bunch of different changes in the way that we look at breeding cannabis, at least in the California market. I think that people are going to continue to optimize smells and flavors and, yeah, we'll kind of see what it brings. I hope we've moved away from the THC numbers, people choosing weed in that way, but who knows?

Yeah, trending wise, THC still seems to trump. But there are people, I think, that are becoming more aware as they come, more aware of their palate and their experience. And there's no doubt that you can use the same cultivar over and over again and it just starts to lose its edge. And then someone will come in with something that just could be half the potency. But it's a unique new chemical profile and it has incredible effects or even stronger effects than what they were using. In some cases. We find that from a retail level, a lot of people have to kind of bounce around. They're. They're not kind of staying on something for too long. They'll have a couple staples, but they're always floating new cultivars into their kind of daily, weekly regimen.

Variety is the spice of life, as my father used to say. So all consumers are looking for same. Same, but different.

Yeah, I agree.

It's different, though. Today, again, like, it's like Mark was saying, you used to be able to go in to see your dealer and stick your nose in a bag or a jar and see if you like the smell. And you'd turn, you would choose what you were going to buy. If there was choice at all, you would choose based on, you know, organoleptic measures, right. On how it made you feel or smell or whatever, whatever you like the smell of. And we kind of totally fucked up that game. It's like now it's like Mark said, everybody's. Everything's done by lab report and you can't see or touch the butt. At least in the Canadian regulated market, you know, it's got to be in an opaque container and you can't, you can't smell it. You know, they'll have jars, they'll have these jars open on the counter, or at least they did pre Covid that you could pick up and smell. But, you know, they certainly weren't replacing it with fresh product every day.

States is the same way, I think, you know, with the exception of maybe Oklahoma and a couple others, you know, that kind of let you, you know, put your face in it, so to speak. But yeah, everyone's transitioning.

I don't want to, I don't want to buy anybody weed that they've shoved up their nose either. But, you know, like, there is, there's got to be a happy medium. I think we'll move a little bit away from some of these medical regulations and we'll have, we Will have like medical formulated products that are probably better and more accurate than they are today. We'll have more diversity of non flowers product formats on the market.

Everything's shifting. I mean, if you look at like a New Jersey, I think application, they're doing, I think lounges. So you know, maybe you can go back to the way it kind of used to be, you know, in Holland where you could get a little bit, you know, try it out on the spot. If you liked it, you go down and buy a little bit more.

That speaks to the whole, you know, like using our own organoleptic bioassay. You have to have that previous experience for it to hit that nose. So like if you never tried haze, for instance, and you walk into a dispensary and you smell haze, you don't make that instant connection, that association with the effect that's associated with that terpene profile. So what we're seeing now in California specifically is we're driven towards these really loud terpene profiles that people have an instant connection with because they relate to other products in their lives, for instance. So we have to kind of give people that opportunity through having things like terpene classes and guiding them more towards what effects are associated with those terpenes so that they can learn that, hey, me as a person, I want this profile. If you just let them go drive by their nose and they don't have any previous experience with all these different varieties, then they don't get it. And I see that a lot with the, with the youth now who don't haven't experienced these spicy, herbaceous, woodsy, old school, African and you know, haze varieties and stuff like that, that when they smell them, it smells woody and funky and resin.

It doesn't take them anywhere because they don't have that history.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. They don't get that instant connection where they just, you know, they know. So we can't let the consumer guide the direction that the breeders take us in the way they are now, because the consumer isn't. The market's not mature enough for them to have made the right decisions.

Yeah, it's part of the artisan too. Unfortunately, Mark had to part ways. He's a busy man today. And we're getting right here towards the end. So this one's a bigger question. And you know, you can't really talk about the future without talking about things like CRISPR or GMOs or gene editing or any of this stuff. And I know, Ryan, you mentioned CRISPR on your last comment so I'll pick on you here a little bit. And yeah, how do you see this technology coming into play here? And I guess, what does it mean to you in the future of cannabis?

Yeah, I kind of put CRISPR in with other forms of biotechnology that we haven't really even touched at all upon. But you know, there's, there's, there's breeding. You know, people talk about genetics and it's usually focused on either the plant seeds or the breeding techniques that we use to make those plant seeds. But we're now living in a world where there's all sorts of technologies like crispr. So CRISPR is like, you can think of it like a word processor for genes. Like we can go in and correct the misspelling of a genetic word. Right. Or change, or change the genetic spelling of a word and make it mean something else. And that's really cool. But it's like a one time thing that we do to change a trait. And it's kind of a shortcut that we used to do something called EMS mutation breeding where you take plant seeds and you'd subject them to a chemical mutagen that would change the DNA in little spots just randomly and then you grow the seeds out and see what changed. And usually that kind of thing is reserved for inducing variation in species that don't have variation. Which is very different from cannabis because like I said before, cannabis has all this genetic variation because it breeds like humans do. Like, it doesn't breed to itself naturally. It normally breeds to a male or female plant that's a sibling or that's growing in the same patch or a nearby patch. Right. And so we can use these methods like tilling or eco tilling, which is a method for kind of figuring out what these, you know, isolating these, these genetic, rare genetic changes and figuring out what they do, you know. So that's kind of on the breeding end, but there's also this whole technology that we can do. And I think everybody kind of understands, you know, with immunization and vaccines going on, you know, the idea that you get this vaccine and it's, it's a virus or a genetic instruction to produce protein that kind of triggers your immune system and prepares it for the incoming onslaught of an organism. Right. That your immune system hasn't seen. And you can do that same thing with plants. I mean, we talked last time about plant viruses. And one of the reasons why tissue culture is useful is we can remove viruses from, from plant lines, plant cell lines, but you can also use, you know, they're kind of forms of biotechnology to like something called vigs or viral induced genes silencing. Right. So you can use, you can infect the plant with a virus that might not do anything too problematic to the plant, but it, it has a gene that would interfere with a virus if the virus ever came along. Right. And so you can actually like engineer immunity into these plants from specific viruses. And there's a whole bunch of different ways that you can do that. And it's a whole field on its own that's, you know, cyber could host a host of talk on it, but it's something that's going to come to cannabis and we're going to start seeing plants that are genetically enhanced to be able to deal with viruses or other pathogens that exist in the environment.

Rob, what's your thoughts on some of the GMO potential with cannabis?

I think it's all fascinating. It's the future, obviously. How far down the road the future manifests is another story. But like Ryan's been saying, we really need to straighten out the genome before we start doing too many complicated things. Not just looking for triploids, which just multiply the existing genome, but understanding the genome better through sequencing. And before we start messing around with specific parts of it, we need to know what those specific parts are and what they control. One of my. I like how Ryan has said that basically crispr, he just lumps them with the other biotech techniques. And I think as far as where we are with cannabis, that's appropriate. I have a question of my own about crispr. What I've learned about it is it seems to be an excellent way to locate and negate, as in snippet out of the genome a particular DNA combination which could be a gene for a specific trait. But I've not seen much evidence for what everybody dreams about. The CRISPR can be used to not just edit by deletion, but edit by substitution of another gene combination. So where is CRISPR with other plants at in terms of that as crispr actually insert a gene or just delete a gene?

Yeah, no, you can totally do it. Like, for example, you can insert purple into a plant line, right. And even have it express under. Under specific conditions. But yeah, you could take a white flower and make the flower purple with inserting one gene. It's like the way I describe it, Rob, is it's kind of like a, like a jig is for carpentry. Right. It's like, you know, say you're cutting it, you're cutting a table you put a jig on your table and then you can cut out a very specific piece of the table and take another piece and cut it back in. Right. And so the crispr, what you're talking about, the deletions are what's called loss of function mutation. You can disrupt even just a couple of base pairs, or you might cut out like 3 or 10 or 20 base pairs and that's enough to destroy the gene. The other thing that you can do with CRISPR is you can cut in a different variant, right? Like a different genetic variant that, that, you know. So if you had, for example, you know, in, in say we're talking about eye colors in humans, if you're right at the beginning of the cell, you know, you can take out a mutant blue eyed gene version and cut back in a version that was pigmented. Right. Let's say, you know, a human example from, you know, we're talking about plants, but it's really. Yeah, just explain.

Designer babies is definitely a real.

So if you have, if you had like a. Yeah, but I mean, it's, it's kind of what we're talking about with plants too. I mean, if the whiteness of a petal was the result of a lost anthocyanin gene or a mutated anthocyanin gene. My point is, Rob, is that you cut back in a functional copy of that gene. Right. The thing about CRISPR is it's like it's really tied with tissue culture because it happens on a single cellular level. Like, we're not talking crispr. Take a plant and dip it in. In CRISPR juice and all of a sudden it starts growing. You know, like these changes have to happen at a genetic level and those changes have to be consistent and true for every cell that grow that every cell line that grows out of the mutated or the CRISPR cell, if you will. Right. And so it's kind of a two step process where you're making these on a very small group of cells that all incorporate that trait. And then when those cells grow, and then, then you have to grow those cells into a full plant.

Right.

And once it's in the plant, you can breed it like any other trait. Right. It's not something that we keep doing on, but you keep doing. You know, you have to keep going over and over again.

Right.

Once it, once you've crispred a trait into a cell line or a plant, you can then pass that trait through using traditional breeding methods.

Mohave, what's your take? Because you've got such an interesting kind of upbringing. You know, you're a second generation Californian grower now we're starting to talk about almost. It's almost like if Silicon Valley were to move into Santa Cruz county, which actually technically they've been doing for a while now. But you have this kind of like Elon Musk technology here, which is very different than kind of on the core fundamental beliefs of that you were raised on. And a lot of your breeding approaches.

Ethically, I don't think there's anything wrong with it if it's done responsibly. But I think that we're just a long ways away, as we've kind of been highlighting throughout this conversation, that traditional breeding techniques are key to get to the starting point for more advanced techniques. And I think that since we kind of skipped over that process, we, you know, we have to select the plants that we want to improve first. You know, crispr. You know, if we're editing in a single trait, we want a variety that's closest to that trait that we're trying to edit in.

Right.

We don't want to take a small leafy variety and turn it into a tall, chunky variety.

Right.

We want to get as close as possible. And I think that, you know, we, we owe it to consumers, cannabis, the environment, everyone, to kind of fully explore what was already there. You know, like I kind of like compare it to. There was this book and documentary a few years ago called the Journey of Man and we, it was at project where we're trying to collect genetic information from as many isolated populations around the world. And kind of the what came out of that is that it happened at just the right time. Had it happened 10 years later, all those populations would have intermingled and we wouldn't have had the information that we knew about the human genome or it would have been a lot harder to parse out how the story of how mankind came out of Africa and spread into all these different populations around the world. And I think it's similar with cannabis that we were isolated for so long just geographically, and then we were forced into isolation through prohibition. And then we all came out of that kind of racing towards this new modern cannabis industry. But we skipped over this slower, more progressive stage of kind of going through all these different populations to see what value that they had. And I think is important, especially for the traditional farmer who doesn't have access to a lot of these tools.

Even for the people you have the tools, it's important to do those things. I mean, we're talking about, like, I believe it was a Caucasian man that was first sequenced, right? And so it's like, great, we got one genome, full genome of one white guy, right? Like, what does that really tell us about the genetic variation across the species? Not a hell of a lot, Right. So eventually sequencing was really damn expensive to do it back then, but now we can sequence genomes really quickly and for not very much money. So it became about doing what was called the Thousand Genomes Project, right, Where we sequence genomes from a thousand different people, men and women of all different colors and genetic backgrounds from all over the planet. And that way you can look at any given gene and look for the variation within those genes. And, you know, even a thousand genomes, you're not going to capture the breadth of the genetic variation within the species. Like, really, you need 10,000 or 100,000 genomes. And even as you sequence more, like you're going to randomly find new mutations, right? But essentially, those alleles or those genetic variants or SNPs, there's a catalog of them, right, within the species. Like, there's a set of alleles that the species produces, and we don't know what those sets are. We're starting to learn about it with some of the work that aitkendemar did with the genetic variants that the THC acid synthase. But that kind of variation that you see in the cannabinoid production genes, I'm willing to bet anything that that type of variation is seen almost all the way across the genome. You might not see it in some very important housekeeping genes that have to do with, like, cellular division or whatever, you know, photosynthesis, some of those things are more highly conserved. But every other trait, you're going to see a level of genetic variation. And really what sequencing is going to allow us to do is make a catalog of that variation at every genetic locus or every genetic spot on the cross chromosome. And once we understand what those variants are and what they confer to the plant or to the biological pathways of the plant, then we're going to be able to put those things together or reassemble those things using breeding techniques in a different way to really create optimized plants.

Right.

But we got a lot discovery to go to get there.

I think the good thing with most cannabis breeders is they seem to have a decent level of patience because, yeah, we've got to kind of wait for things to catch up a bit before. Before we're too destructive. This last question will be for you Ryan to kind of represent, speak on behalf of Canada and then Mohave, if you don't mind kind of answering on behalf of, you know, California and kind of the general states. The question is, Ryan, for you, should licensed producers be investing in in house plant breeding or maybe is this something they should be outsourcing to like a micro license as an example?

Tough to do in a micro license. You can probably do some screening. But like real breeding, I don't know. You can really grow a thousand plan. I think we're going to see both types. Like I said that company from Israel and set up shop down in San Diego. They're called Canbreed. They're going to cater to a larger clientele, probably more corporate. I think it really just depends on the size of the company. Genetic innovation is important, but you know, most wineries are still growing the same old wine grapes that they have been for, you know, hundreds of years and just taking pride in doing that one type and doing it really well. So I think that we'll probably see people that, they figure out a cultivar that really works for them and they like and they produce really well and it's received really well consistently on the marketplace and they'll specialize in that, maybe play around with a little bit. But I think that like, you know, any, any square foot that you dedicate to R and D is not a square foot that you're pretty.

No, it's expensive. It's expensive too from a Capex standpoint. You know, when you look at it and there's obviously risk if you kind of got pollen in the space and.

And, and, and, and then you start talking about like, I mean, you know, the amount of cost that it takes to just do the chemical analysis. Just the chemical analysis. Right. Or for, even for just beans and cannabinoids, you're not even looking at some of these other volatile compounds. Or at least maybe you are doing volatiles, but you're not looking at oil content or root, you know, chemicals or resistances or chemicals involved. Resistance. I mean it adds up really, really, really quickly. Like if you're, you know, even if you're doing it in house and you can get like a hundred dollar retail test down to $30 cost. If you're growing a thousand plants, that's 30 grand.

Sure.

And so that's, you know, it's a, it's a specific business model and it's a specific type that's going to understand. Putting that kind of money into R and D leads to like a difference in the marketplace that gets you an roi. Right. So I think, see people that like, I think we'll see segmentation breeding companies and there'll be some small breeders kind of the way there are today. And then there'll be the Syngenta big time players that are doing it big ag style with lots of markers as the selection and lots of money and public money.

It's interesting how genetics don't drive evaluation as much in cannabis as they do in other traditional crops. You know, we start talking about Syngenta and everything like that. You know, the genetics are everything, they drive a lot of the evaluation. But for whatever reason, it's like the infrastructure or the sales, it's not like, oh, my genetic portfolio, it's a tricky one to put a financial number to the value of it. For a lot of these companies.

The industry is so young, dude, that everybody's like, they're looking at your clothes, not what's inside. Right. And there's that whole expression is, you know, it's what's inside that counts, it's not what's on the COVID Right?

Yeah.

And there's can't build an industry, you can't build a multi billion dollar ag industry on plants that have been selected by like 20 year olds in closets. Like that's just not the way that it works. You know what I mean? And I'm not saying that the 20 year olds in closets didn't do a decent job in some things they did. There was, there, there are like a few, what I'll call breeding wins, but like the amount of breeding losses that had to like pile up for wins to losses, you know, like the ratio is way out of whack. And I think that as we start treating cannabis as like a true scaled ag product, you know, and again, also understanding that it's not a widget, like you're not just trying to pump out a million widgets. Right. Like these are experiences that are, that are touching people.

Right.

So I don't know.

Yeah, I just add that, you know, it's great for groups to have proprietary cultivars. That's, that's all good, but it's not easy. And to try to build a brand around a unique cultivar is challenging when people circulate through so many different cultivars throughout the years. You know, there's, there's, there's only been a few companies who've been really successful doing that. But I think just like Ryan's point on grapes, we have to land somewhere eventually that we hope through all this breeding effort collectively, we get to an end game, which is particular varieties that are suited for specific use in specific regions under specific cultivation strategies, and then we all utilize those varieties as a whole, because that's the only way to make the market really function, for the supply chain to really function, for the consumers to really understand what properties they're getting out of their cannabis. We can't just expect them. We can't have 2, 3, 4, 5,000 different choices. And for the hundreds of thousands and millions of consumers just to navigate through that, to select the varieties that work best for them, we collectively, as an industry, have to develop the Pinot Noir, the Cabernet, the Merlot, the Sangiovese, the Cab Franc, all the different varieties. I picked only red there, but that's my. Anyway, so we have to get there. And once we get there, then there's a lot of variety improvement that can happen. I mean, there's thousands of different clones of Pinot Noir that are available, but they're all available. And your selection for what variety you grow tends to come from an already established, robust industry that knows that this particular clone grows well in this region of this particular Appalachian. So it's, you know, we have to get there first. And I think that's a big challenge. And right now, we're so obsessed. I mean, I hear this obsession with dispensary owners here in California. They have to constantly pump out the new new, because the consumer comes in there wanting this quest. They're on this quest to find something new, partially, I think, because they never land on something that works for them the right way, or they're not guided towards the right choice. But we have to make that selection for them. We can't expect the market to evolve based off of this massive diversity, this paradox of choice. But everyone thinks it's a fascination right now that experience all that cannabis can be. But in order for the market to mature, we kind of have to land on certain areas. So that's going to be breeding, and more than breeding, it's going to be kind of what production techniques work best. And then hopefully we get there, and then consumers can make the right choices and the market can mature. But right now in California, it's just a mess because it's hundreds and hundreds of different cultivars that all have a very similar effect. But consumers are excited at the hunt. They go from dispensary to dispensary, and there's never two menus that look alike.

Yeah, it's really challenging for the Grower, especially at scale, to be able to make those changes based off of market demand. Oftentimes I hear growers, you know, after then growing for three or five years commercially in California, say I should have just grown OG Kush this whole time, you know, or some kind of statement like that, because it's a, it's a classic thing. It was difficult for them to stay on the edge or on the cusp of, you know, what that new new is.

Well, it's actually impossible. I mean, no one person could constantly be at the edge. Plant breeding doesn't progress at that rate, you know what I mean? It takes three months to grow to, to make a seed, you know. Well, sorry, four weeks to make a seed, but another three call it to grow that seed. If everybody wants something new in eight months, there's just not enough time to select the new plant, test it, bulk it up into a production system. You know, it's like that, that rate of desire for something new, it's like at some point it has to be tempered with reality.

Yeah, for sure. I agree. Well, as always, this is a never ending conversation of cannabis. We're kind of exceeded our time here. I learned a ton today, so thank you so much. Thank you, Segra, for hosting. And then I'm going to turn it over to Ian Davidson with a couple closing notes here.

All right, thanks everybody for joining. If you've got any follow up questions that we weren't able to get to, you've got contact information here for each of our panelists. Thank you guys all very much for joining on the panel. Thanks everyone for joining out there in cyberspace. We'll be announcing some future growth talks very soon, so please stay tuned. And again, if you have any topics you'd like us to consider for the future talks, please let us know. Yeah. Please be in touch and have a great day. We'll talk to you all soon.