How Genetics Is Reshaping The Marijuana Industry

[garyfisher]

http://fusion.net/story/40949/marijuana-genetics/

 

Click the link for pictures and full story.  I wasn't able to paste the entire thing.

 

 

Every morning, Josh Chase makes his way from Goetz House, a yellow-and-white cottage in the middle of nowhere Washington, past a makeshift 8-foot “security fence” built from square-cut pieces of lumber and black plastic tarp, down to the greenhouses. A sign hangs on the fence: “PERSONS UNDER 21 NOT ALLOWED ON THESE PREMISES.”

He’s on his way to tend his buds. At 25, Chase is the second oldest of four recent college grads who co-founded Amerifarms, a marijuana startup headquartered in Washington’s “Kush Valley.”

Goetz House, Amerifarms’ frat-style living quarters. Photo: Amerifarms.

The team has four greenhouses stuffed with 2,000 plants — 54 varieties in total — and a proprietary nutrient cocktail that’s supposed to bring out their fattest and most potent nugs. “We’re weeding through to see what [plants] work best with our system,” said Chase, a former financial analyst turned Amerifarms’ master grower. “It’s not just about selling exactly what the consumer wants. As a grower, we have to develop what’s new. We have to figure out the next new things.”

In the Bay Area and Washington state, for example, Girl Scout Cookies — a top-shelf hybrid variety of pot known for its minty, skunky aroma — is really popular. The young company is trying to predict what the next generation of Girl Scout Cookies will be.

That process requires a good and stable growing environment, some intuition about how consumers’ tastes will shift, and, perhaps most importantly, a solid understanding of the plants’ genetics. Amerifarms says it’s got the first two. The industry is still trying to figure out the third.

This is the beginning of the Green Rush. Genetics is poised to help entrepreneurs create better, more powerful, and sometimes personalized strains, which can be classified into a Yelp-like rating system that’s actually rooted in science. But which entrepreneurs? There’s a battle brewing between open-source stoners and Big Weed, and who wins might determine if the pot industry is led by a company like Monsanto or one like Tesla.

The Grateful Dead, ChemDawg DNA and the Amazon cloud

[trichcycler]

Good find! thanks for the share!

 

 

So McKernan, a veteran of the Human Genome Project, slipped a DNA purification kit through airport security and jerry-rigged a lab in the Dylan Hotel in pot-friendly Amsterdam. His mission was simple: take a sample of a cannabis plant, macerate it, isolate its DNA, and take that back to the States for sequencing. He’d done DNA extraction many times before, though never in a hotel room. Still, he succeeded. He traveled back with a container that housed Chemdawg’s DNA. (He didn’t declare it.) DNA is just information, so it’s perfectly legal to work with, even if it comes from cannabis.\\\

[YesMichigan]

Good find! thanks for the share!

 

 

DNA is just information, so it’s perfectly legal to work with, even if it comes from cannabis.\\\

 

Great reading indeed.

 

I'll admit I would not have mentioned the DNA. I've always been a "Rather beg for forgiveness than ask for permission" kind of person. McKernan sounds like the same type of person. That is quite a story.