Came across this interesting site on the 'net.
Cannabis DNA visualized.
Not sure if this is pertinent but our local cannabis production facility is hiring breeders.
Creation of elite strains caught my eye.
Iâm wondering if they are buying into the phylos deal
Ugh. âconsumer productâ is what catches my Yuck.
Customer/Business - accustomed, familiar to eachother
Consumer/Business - suction + pumping
Breeding associate in the title then, assistant breeder in the job synthesis ^^ Then yes, âconsumerâ.
It mean all the ungrateful heavy duty 24/7 (cloning, transplanting, pre-selection, seedlings care, nutes management âŚ), more responsabilities than the âlead breederâ himself for a rate/hour than say âdonât complain itâs a dream jobâ. Letâs be optimistic, 25% of the entire crop truly dedicated for breeding and the rest for weed production lol
And the legendary âNow 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 canât show you. My vault is top secret.â ^^ 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.
I thought it was interesting because if these commercial companies are developing âstrainsâ that they arenât registering with phylos, then they must not be afraid of copyright issues going forward.
Maybe they know something?
I wouldnât waste too much money on registering strains
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 theyâve got a bunch of high THC strains that produce weight and taste different; which isnât that hard with thousands of available strains.
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 Iâm 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 thatâs about when her eyes glazed over
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 thatâs when I decided to start growing⌠if I canât find it, Iâll grow it, because indica doesnât handle nerve pain like sativa and is useless during the day if you work lol.
So so true. I drove 6 hours to get a clone of Durban Poison.
Itâs not âthe Oneâ but it does have a certain âsomethingâ to it.
But now Iâll have a half-dozen variants of the DP to try next year.
yes, Cobra50 hooked me up with a ton of Durban varieties, so Iâll 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
This seems like a good place for this.
Very true, didn´t think of that before you knowâŚ
Actually, aseptic protocols include bleach, alcohol and another substances in order to start the âexplantâ
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.
I think people are overvalueing their local cuts a bit.
waddup axe.
i agree⌠but isnât that always the case?
once somebody has âtheirâ keeper itâs a superstar to them until they see other peoplesâ chit⌠& even still may think their Bagseed Badass is elite.
heh
guilty as charged
Phylos is a scam. You pay to get strain DNAâd and their end game is to patent said DNA.
their end game is actually the opposite, if you didnât know, they run the Open Cannabis Project, which is specifically so that corporations CANNOT patent cannabis dna/genomes
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 donât have the necessary resources to do any of the things theyâre being accused of. For a full DNA read that would be usuable to reconstruct a full & complete DNA strand itâs 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, youâre 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 youâre looking at $60,000 for a dozen runs.)
Additionally, they havenât had a single âleakâ of information pointing to anything nefarious in the entire time theyâve existed as a company. I donât know of a single notable bad thing thatâs ever happened inside a company that didnât result in an employee, family member or friend of an employee, letting something slip. Theyâve had tons of outsiders with almost no understanding of modern genetics making wild accusations, but thatâs true of every single field of science for as far back as weâve 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 canât be patented, because itâs 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 âflavor of the dayâ strains currently being hyped.
Without needing any specialized software we can already see that they never actually ran a âfull readâ 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. Thatâs 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 itâs 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 doesnât 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 didnât actually derive the full DNA sequence of these thousand samples they still published all their data. Iâve 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.
Letâs 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 arenât 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 canât afford, then theyâd 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, âBut 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,â except youâd 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 âbring a cell back to lifeâ 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 itâs massively expensive, $25,000. So, itâs 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.
PS. The next guy that screams âPhylos is stealing my stuff,â is going to have to show me how theyâre 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. Iâll 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 theyâve chosen in their hypothetical scenario.
What sold me was they did a roundtable convention, with DJ short and some others⌠DJ Short as Iâm 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, thatâs something to take note of. They donât want cannabis patented because that would KILL breeders, once itâs patented it will quickly become homogenized, and marijuana as you know it would be killed except for underground local breeders who donât use commercial strains to breed.
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.
Iâm 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.
They do more than just mapping a sample to a name, they cross link it to a person. That one factor matters. Youâll never be looking at âGhost OGâ, but rather the âGhost OGâ as presented by Joe Blow.
In all scenarios where a strain name is in question itâs left to the public to decide which is the legitimate sample. (The cannabis community already has too many âstrain copsâ, 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 doesnât matter if you submit first, you still get even footing with other submittals.
Yes, sir!