They apparently don’t understand the amount of IT people that enjoy herb and growing it.
Saying no one else can get their data-set sounds like a challenge
Reading my mind… hack-a-thon?
Looks like they run on AWS, good foot in the door. Guaranteed they don’t have something configured/hardened…
It’s not strange at all really. Plants emit a stress frequency when they are not healthy that bugs hone in on. It is this frequency and not the plant the bugs are targeting. A healthy plant does not emit this stress frequency, and is literally invisible to a would-be pest. Bugs can land right on the plant and not even know they’re on their food source. Pretty neat. Hands down the best defense a plant can possibly have against creepy crawly predators is a healthy balanced soil with all the microbes in it that nature intended.
Bt GMOs have been used a lot longer than a decade. Farms are required to plant non-Bt refuges when growing Bt crops. Varieties also incorporate multiple Bacillus cry toxins at higher than lethal doses. Strategies like this slow evolution of resistance in insect populations. You could also cause resistance simply by applying Bt to crops the old fashion way if you cover everything all the time.
You can get patents without GMO, they are harder to enforce. Plant Variety Protection can also be used for true breeding seed lines.
Phylos is a lot further from the things you all are talking about here than you’d think. To make good marker assisted selection programs, you need to develop good markers. The Cannabis genome is poorly annotated without good data of what genes result in what trait. There is homology among other better described crop plants, but not for things like bud density, terpene profile, or minor cannabinoid production. You need a lot of that before you make good MAS protocols or directed gene editing… Also CRISPR has off-target effects frequently.
There are markers for THC, CBD, CBG dominance and autoflowering. But I am skeptical that even those are that break through. Gas chromatography and waiting a couple weeks when growing can do that already (and I am trying out my hunch that plants carrying one recessive auto allele from photo:auto crosses can be separated by the length of their critical night period.) Those old techniques also didn’t cost millions of investor money.
That’s good to know; I had kind of a general understanding of what was going on but I didn’t realize how far away Phylos actually was from being able to do meaningful targeted gene editing. I have no doubt that as cannabis becomes a part of larger agribusiness it’ll eventually end up there, but I’m certainly not in any rush for it to reach that point. In any case, for the portion of members here that enjoy growing landrace strains, assuming they’re actually true-breeding, it sounds like any changes in patents won’t matter to them due to the PVP you mentioned.
Here is a an interview where they attempt some damage control.
I don’t know what to think about it. A lot of what he says makes sense, but they went about it all sneaky. There are going to be huge companies doing the same stuff. Searching for markers for resistances and yield increases. At least they pretended that they were going to possibly make some of that info available to joe blow through their pay for tests. The other guys who do it probably wont even bother talking to any of us and just horde the info for their own purposes. And people act like phylos had to steal a key to get the plants to test. They can just order every seed on the net, and then they actually have the seeds to go with the info, and again don’t have to talk to us. Testing other peoples piece of plant without a seed or clone to work with isn’t all that helpful to them in that way.
Set up OG as a non-profit. Start using the same Plant IP registration as them.
https://www.ams.usda.gov/services/plant-variety-protection/pvpo-requirements
The original estimate was that it would only work for four years. I’m glad they were wrong, but at some point it’s a foregone conclusion that the bugs will gain resistance. Bugs will take a few bites and decide to get another meal somewhere else, or they will find the plants just shortly before laying eggs and just take a few bites, not enough to kill them.
Funniest thing I have read in a long time haha… Good Luck with that!
There are costs to resistance. Without pressure (in this case from the specific cry toxins in Bt crops), populations often loose unneeded resistance traits. Bacillus thuringiensis makes a lot more toxins than the ones put into crops. Adult insects don’t discriminate between Bt and non-Bt crops. They just usually die if they eat enough, or lay eggs and the larvae die because they are stuck on a Bt GMO plant. Whether resistance is an inevitability depends on how much non-Bt food is available for the insect populations, if cry toxins are stacked in single variety or different types of toxins are rotated over time, and what the costs of resistance are to the insect. Same thing with antibiotics really. Also, I am not defending GMOs per se. Just saying there are strategies to address some of the concerns with them.
Here are some of the risks I worry about and some ways to offset these risks.
Finally got around to reading the article in its entirety, uninterrupted. I love the scolding/advice at the end. This whole situation blew my mind. It was around the time when I was really getting into learning about the different strains and growing methods and consuming a lot of information and came across this debacle. What a piece of shit thing to do!!!
I feel like the best thing for this community to do is to share as much info about Phylos and all their future moves/company affiliations, etc. A slimeball company like this needs to be watched carefully.
I remember an interview I listened to with Ryan Lee of Chimera Genetics and he was talking about how China has a machine where they can plug in samples of a bunch of plants and it will compute and tell you exactly which ones to breed with for certain desired traits taking literal YEARS off an average breeding timeline. I could be summarizing a little but still, I just remember thinking how insane that was. How can any small craft farm compete with that?! Anyway, I guess we’ll see. All of this is so interesting. Breeders should have some sort of proprietary over their breeding projects but then again how does anyone OWN a plant? Anyway, I’m rambling.
Cool. The insects in my backyard add to the wonder of my backyard. I doubt I will have any interest in weed with caterpillar-killing genes. I trust nature. Also, I keep learning many metaphorically adaptable lessons related to life just by observing growth. I would explain but language is not classy enough to do those lessons justice yet. lol or at least my vocabulary isn’t.
Hi guys, regarding BT, I can talk about the situation in Brazil. Hardly anyone plants conventional corn (not GMOs) around the edges. There are thousands of hectares selecting the most resistant caterpillars. And this is not by chance, because multinationals already have the next effective product to sell.
But the biggest problem this can bring is genetic contamination. I’ve seen open pollinated corn, with 4 transgenic technologies.
I know in India, region of origin and maintainers of several varieties of rice. There is a variety, planted centuries ago by an isolated community, of salinity-resistant rice.
There is a company that is advancing this, claiming that they were selection rings.
Vanda Shiva fights for this cause.
Finally, the problem is monoculture, field monoculture, food, consumption and MONOCULTURE OF THE MIND.
We need to do it differently, as the author said at the end of the text.
I think if we all had aspirations like Sebring or any of these guys giving large quantities of quality genetics for next to nothing to as much of the public as they can manage we’d be much better off and could mitigate the effects of these corporations (though I understand the individual undertaking that’d be and how unrealistic it is) if not reverse them.
That’s my dream/goal at least, undercut the man until I change my immediate surroundings that I have control over for the better, you can’t kill an idea.
Fuck maybe we get better at it than them? Did you know a crispr gene modifying machine (at least a year or two ago) could be bought for less than I paid for my TrimPal?
Meaning any backyard scientist could be gene manipulating as we speak, their motives their own but if someone with a moral code and conscience were at the wheel it could also be a game changer
I hear in India some things like corn are produced from seeds turned over from a 1000 years ago and as a result taste amazing and not like the mast produced food in north America. If it is anything like difference between a garden tomatoes and grocery store tomatoes, there is no comparison. Either way I would like to go to an Indian free seed trade and get some heirloom everything. Also some bread from Europe on the way back.
I watched a cool doc on ants and how when a poison is introduced into there population , the poison is eaten by only some ants, the survivors of the poisoning breed, those off spring are resistant. I also watched the news for years and farmers have to throw around big money and I am sure ever season they will be pitched the next big money saving, crop increasing solution.commercial farmers and people who purchase there product need worry more about what they are getting into than members of this group of seed stackers and clone cutters. anyway if I found a caterpillar in my grow room I would name it lol If people want to avoid bugs in there out door it is about getting the soil right , don’t over do the nitrogen from what i read. Bugs are little friends pointing out problems, plotting against them seem counterintuitive.working with them seems like a better goal.
Seeds are not plants…big difference. A seed is kind of a recipe written on a card, but without the plant, there is no way to know what that recipe will actually produce…Growers had to go through many many hundreds of thousands of plants to find the keepers, and they should be the ones benefitting from all that work. In the future companies like phylos will be able to make the exact plant ( which was not theirs) they tested in good faith.
Corn is a New World plant… so if you want a 1000 year old variety (which probably doesn’t exist in the same form regardless) it would more likely be in central America.
Fun Fact corn was domesticated from teosinte more than 6,000 years ago by Native Americans
I was going to say something about that
… I think he meant rice or grain