PHYLOS grumblings

Came across this interesting site on the 'net.
Cannabis DNA visualized.

3 Likes

Not sure if this is pertinent but our local cannabis production facility is hiring breeders.


Creation of elite strains caught my eye.
I’m wondering if they are buying into the phylos deal

1 Like

Ugh. “consumer product” is what catches my :eye: Yuck.

Customer/Business - accustomed, familiar to eachother
Consumer/Business - suction + pumping :money_with_wings:

:upside_down:

:evergreen_tree:

4 Likes

Breeding associate in the title then, assistant breeder in the job synthesis ^^ Then yes, “consumer”.

It mean all the ungrateful heavy duty 24/7 (cloning, transplanting, pre-selection, seedlings care, nutes management …), more responsabilities than the “lead breeder” himself for a rate/hour than say “don’t complain it’s a dream job”. Let’s be optimistic, 25% of the entire crop truly dedicated for breeding and the rest for weed production lol

And the legendary “Now you have 3 months to find the phenos of the breeding plan of the lead breeder : rainbow colored buds, flowering time 1 month, 35% thc. Easy, i do that in sleeping but i can’t show you. My vault is top secret.” ^^ Half joking but the announce is typical lol

Better to work in a grow op, at least you take your money and the roles are clear.

7 Likes

I thought it was interesting because if these commercial companies are developing “strains” that they aren’t registering with phylos, then they must not be afraid of copyright issues going forward.
Maybe they know something?
I wouldn’t waste too much money on registering strains

3 Likes

I think the thing that prevents companies from being motivated to register is the fact that 90% of legal markets only care about the cheapest high THC product they can buy. Strains and strain names mean nothing as long as they’ve got a bunch of high THC strains that produce weight and taste different; which isn’t that hard with thousands of available strains.

10 Likes

Ugh, for sure… When my wife first started smoking cannabis for pain management this year… she just thought weed was … weed (context: I used to sell weed back in high school, and quite successfully because I’m OCD and have to know everything before I start something)
I, of course, was flabbergasted, and tried explaining sativa vs indica, and what effect the terpenes have in relation to medical issues… and that’s about when her eyes glazed over :persevere:
I told her if she wants relief from the specific issues she is having, then she needs a specific strain (or strains) to #1: alleviate that symptom, and 2: backup for when you start getting tolerance to the first strain, and finally 3: daytime and nighttime strains, for when you have to be productive, or you have to sleep.
That battle is still in progress… mainly because out here the only strain really for sell is Gas… total indica fest. There was 1 time she had fruity pebbles, but it appeared to be old and larfy. So that’s when I decided to start growing… if I can’t find it, I’ll grow it, because indica doesn’t handle nerve pain like sativa and is useless during the day if you work lol.

9 Likes

So so true. I drove 6 hours to get a clone of Durban Poison. :rolling_eyes:
It’s not “the One” but it does have a certain ‘something’ to it.

But now I’ll have a half-dozen variants of the DP to try next year. :smile:

:evergreen_tree:

10 Likes

yes, Cobra50 hooked me up with a ton of Durban varieties, so I’ll be going through those 1 or 2 at a time to see if she reacts well with any of them, or to crossbreed with another… you guys are turning me into a chucker LOL

5 Likes

This seems like a good place for this.

1 Like

Very true, didn´t think of that before you know…

Actually, aseptic protocols include bleach, alcohol and another substances in order to start the “explant”

Correct, a small piece of a leaf will do, in a few weeks you will have very healthy plant that can produce up to hundreds of cuts in one year.

5 Likes

I think people are overvalueing their local cuts a bit.

7 Likes

waddup axe.

i agree… but isn’t that always the case? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

once somebody has “their” keeper it’s a superstar to them until they see other peoples’ chit… & even still may think their Bagseed Badass is elite.

heh

:evergreen_tree: guilty as charged

5 Likes

Phylos is a scam. You pay to get strain DNA’d and their end game is to patent said DNA.

2 Likes

their end game is actually the opposite, if you didn’t know, they run the Open Cannabis Project, which is specifically so that corporations CANNOT patent cannabis dna/genomes
https://opencannabisproject.org/

7 Likes

The first time anyone mentioned that Phylos might be hoarding DNA sample to patent them, or some other nefarious stuff, I started researching them. With a very heavy research background in biotech, marker assisted genetics & advanced biology, I tried figuring out what it would actually take for them to use the DNA samples they have. The reality is that they don’t have the necessary resources to do any of the things they’re being accused of. For a full DNA read that would be usuable to reconstruct a full & complete DNA strand it’s going to cost you between $5,000-$15,000 per run on a brand new machine, depending on the allele duplication rate, which is HUGE in cannabis, especially in modern day cultivars, you’re looking at needing to do dozens or even hundreds of runs to assure the necessary accuracy of the completed genome. (Even at $5,000 a run you’re looking at $60,000 for a dozen runs.)
Additionally, they haven’t had a single “leak” of information pointing to anything nefarious in the entire time they’ve existed as a company. I don’t know of a single notable bad thing that’s ever happened inside a company that didn’t result in an employee, family member or friend of an employee, letting something slip. They’ve had tons of outsiders with almost no understanding of modern genetics making wild accusations, but that’s true of every single field of science for as far back as we’ve had the scientific method.

I pulled up a DNA sample submitted by Phylos to the Open Cannabis Project, which means any strain that has the same identified markers can’t be patented, because it’s been placed in the public domain.


The Deep Dive Down the Rabbit Hole!

This is a screenshot from the National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, which is a national repository kept freely available to the world. This is the same organization that published the genomic data on maize that I used in most of my college studies of advanced biotech. Phylos has published over 1000 DNA read-throughs on the NCBI servers, which covers everything from landraces to almost every one of the “flavor of the day” strains currently being hyped.
Without needing any specialized software we can already see that they never actually ran a “full read” DNA sequence on these samples. What they did do, and always do, is run a sample size read of easily identifiable DNA markers, or Spot reads, which totals 883,450 out of 133.4 million Bases. In other words, they have data points for 0.6% of the total DNA base pairs. That’s exactly like claiming that you can magic up a duplicate clone of a plant because you have a photograph of the plant. To duplicate a plant you need 100% of it’s code, so ALL 133,400,000 base pairs, every damn single one of them. You need all of them, because much of the DNA that doesn’t directly code for proteins, codes for products that have other functions or codes for products that shield the functional DNA from mutation rates.

Even though Phylos didn’t actually derive the full DNA sequence of these thousand samples they still published all their data. I’ve even called them before in the past to ask where I could obtain a full DNA read and the only 1 they ever paid another company to run was immediately published by them and is available on the NCBI website.


Let’s have a look at the machine Phylos is using to run their DNA sequences, the Illumina NextSeq500.

It will only read out a maximum of 300 base pairs, which is like trying to reassemble a stained glass window from a giant pile of multicolored sand, but with the restriction that if too many of the grains of sand aren’t in their original placement then the entire window just shatters into sand again. IF they purchased the PacBio system, which costs $350,000, which they definitely can’t afford, then they’d be able to run full sequences for about $5,000 per DNA run. If we set aside the $350,000 cost of buying the machine, then you still have to shell out five grand for a run. I can assure you that even I can find someone to steal a living clone of your plant for FAR less money.


Now I know there are going to be some non-science savvy people that are going to say, “But they already have a copy of the plant, I sent them that dead as dog shit piece of stem sample. They can just recreate my plant from that,” except you’d be wrong. Once a cell dies there is no bringing it back. All cells have a complex system of triggers that cause the cell to break apart once it stops receiving the nutrients it needs to survive. (This is not apoptosis, but rather a run-away reaction caused by the materials & waste products inside the cell building up into a toxic cellular soup.) The only thing a scientist can do to “bring a cell back to life” is to transplant the DNA sequence, retrieved from a plant cell or reconstructed via biochemistry, into another living cells while removing the DNA sequence that the cells started with. This is exactly how animal cloning is done and it’s massively expensive, $25,000. So, it’s still cheaper to hire a thief.


The take away should be, Lock up your grow and stop freaking out about unfounded conspiracies.
Okay, enough with of my rant! Time to smoke some hash. :sunglasses:

PS. The next guy that screams “Phylos is stealing my stuff,” is going to have to show me how they’re going to do that in a step-by-step manner, fully explaining the biochemistry involved, along with contact information for the companies that are going to supply the reconstructed DNA sequence, and a full explanation of how Phylos stealing their stuff is going to overcome a stringent cost-benefit analysis. I’ll also need to see a full explanation of how they plan on overcoming the DNA read error rates that currently exist for DNA amplification machine they’ve chosen in their hypothetical scenario.

24 Likes

What sold me was they did a roundtable convention, with DJ short and some others… DJ Short as I’m sure most are aware, is actively against patenting cannabis, and actively for public domain… When you have someone as prolific as DJ Short speaking your praise, that’s something to take note of. They don’t want cannabis patented because that would KILL breeders, once it’s patented it will quickly become homogenized, and marijuana as you know it would be killed except for underground local breeders who don’t use commercial strains to breed.

10 Likes

the only thing that makes me skeptical about phylos is the possibility that they are constructing an inaccurate database. the first user to submit a sample under a certain name gets their sample officially published under that name. how are they genetically verifying the cuts initially before adding them to their database? their only basis of comparison is the user submitted genetics already in their database.

I’m not doubting their ability to accurately gather genetic information from a sample and identify all the related samples, but if the labels are incorrect, none of it makes any difference.

2 Likes

They do more than just mapping a sample to a name, they cross link it to a person. That one factor matters. You’ll never be looking at “Ghost OG”, but rather the “Ghost OG” as presented by Joe Blow.

In all scenarios where a strain name is in question it’s left to the public to decide which is the legitimate sample. (The cannabis community already has too many “strain cops”, we surely would be outraged if Phylos was playing cop too.) I believe the democratic approach was the goal of how they decided to display strains. It doesn’t matter if you submit first, you still get even footing with other submittals.

9 Likes

:neutral_face: Yes, sir!

:evergreen_tree: :raised_hand:

4 Likes