Any of our good Canadian friends willing to assist myself and a friend with our tissue culture project? We would love to have some of those rare Canadian cuts to experiment with! Only small tissue samples (like a single leaf) would be needed. Please DM if so. Thanks!
Edit: if this request is borderline, please let me know and I’ll remove. If so, sorry in advance!
are you able to make starts from a single leaf? i really need to look in to tissue cultures… much easier to get past customs than a clone shipper !!! or are you canadian?
Less than a leaf in fact.
US-based 
I’ve seen tissue culture work, amazing stuff!
This is a very interesting subject worthy of its own thread, so here you go @buryseeds!
We have got to get extensive photo work on this subject.
Pleeesse!~
Definitely! I’m not the person doing the actual culturing, that’s being done by a good friend of mine who has invested quite a bit into a lab setup. What I have been doing for him is sourcing cuts. The ultimate goal is to build a genetic library of cultures, similar to how people keep a library of clones. I anticipate that within 5 years or less, the industry is going to make a huge move to culturing as a way to propagate plants, it’s just a lot safer and more secure than keeping clones, you can culture from pretty much any portion of the plant, and much lower risk from a security and scalability perspective.
We’ve gotten a good amount of US-based genetics to start with, but I’ve long been interested in seeing if we can get some samples to culture of Canadian varieties that never really hit the market here. The Romulan Joe cut, for example, I know is famous from BC. Pink Kush is another I hear legends about, but never seen myself. BC Purple Kush is another I hear a lot about. And more than all of those, I’d love to be able to reproduce a Shishkaberry or Kish via culturing. Pretty much any variety that’s known more in Canada than here in the US, I’d be interested in, but we’re really looking to try as many rare or even not so rare genetics as we can, to build the library.
Chemo, BC Roadkill, King Kush, Freezeland…do these things still exist up in Canada even?
Lastly, once we get the cultures up and running, we’d like to get them out to people. That of course is the ultimate goal of the project / POC, to be able to provide a method of propagation to individuals that is safer and easier than current means of spreading plants around.
Lemme know what you guys think!
-buryseeds
Quote from the scientist himself: “It takes about 2 months to get a full callus culture grown. I will be testing the process most likely Friday, unless I start tonight. A node will get growth faster and can be cleaned and put into the solution I have now and grow faster. I was going to callus and node culture everything as backup then test culture against node cuttings for differences.”
Taking that to mean that a callus (a circular cutout portion of a leaf sample) takes longer than a node cutting to culture.
Interested in how this works out. Pics please 
Subbed for this one 
Yes pictures would be great!
Hello @buryseeds and welcome to OG!
Would you mind sharing some details or presenting some results by your friend? Many of us are eager to see some photos!
@buryseeds yes those strains are still very popular around BC. i know dinafem made a feminized version of the UBC chemo called remo’s chemo, it’s won 1st place indica in a couple cups so far this year. this is exactly the future i see for cannabis as well, way better for scalability and long term storage i believe, and i envision starts being able to download and “print” from your desktop. i wish i had more friends in BC. i know @lotus710 is out in BC i wonder if he has access to any of these strains.
Just imagine a piece of plant sitting in an agar sample inside a sterilized tube or jar. After awhile roots will begin to form with the nutrient rich jelly like solution and eventually a new plant will begin to grow out of the roots zone
HOLY CRAP…
I NEVER KNEW this was possible with plants.
Amazing!
And does this need a lab and to be super sterile or is it something doable at home (probably with a reduced success rate vs. a lab?). Impressive, now I get what @legalcanada was talking about the other day (and I was being a Luddite).
it does require a lab and it has to be done in a 100% sterile environment,
Tissue Culture for Cannabis Cultivation Could Replace Cloning as the Gold Standard
Large scale agriculture is at its most efficient when it has a reliable, uniform supply of juvenile plantlets to grow from. Cannabis culture is no different, and starting vegetation phase of growth from already hardened plantlets (as opposed to seeds) saves time and resources otherwise spent on attempting to propagate non-viable or substandard / undesirable seeds within a group. An additional advantage in regulated environments is that the entirety of permitted canopy space can be devoted to growing plants instead of maintaining vegetative mothers and clones. Clonal (that is, genetically identical) plantlets – derived either from mother plant cuttings, or other methods as discussed below – add the even more important advantage of maintaining uniform strain genetics, leading to predictable growth behaviour and mature plant characteristics such as THC and CBD content, terpene profiles, and other strain specific traits which are associated with a strain name and any downstream product branding. Also, clonal plants all reach milestone stages within a much narrower window than plants derived from seeds. Seeds, in contrast, are by their very biological nature genetic reassortants of their parental stocks, making each seed unique; useful for long term selective breeding programs where variety to select from is of use, but not at all desirable once a lineage is selected and uniform product is desired.
Cannabis cultivators have of course known this for a long time. While seeds are used for some smaller scale growth applications, established growth operations almost all work via clonal mother plant cuttings. This ensures product uniformity, but is relatively labor intensive and requires significant physical space for the cutting and hardening stages. Mother plants have a finite lifespan and limited number of cuttings they may provide, making the method relatively slow to scale up. Finally, traditional mother and cut clone systems are susceptible to all of the same plant pathogens (such as Fusarium spp. or powdery mildew) that can infect vegetating and flowering cannabis crops. Infestation of mother plants and clones can in worst case scenarios lead to the complete loss of strain stock – a serious risk for the grower.
A technique widely used in other branches of industrial scale agriculture has the potential to address all of these shortcomings of classical mother and cut clones, and do so economically and with vast scalability. As you’ve probably guessed from the title, this approach is tissue culture (“TC”). Tissue culture from plants involves taking a small amount of plant tissue which is induced to return to- and maintained in- a primitive stage (in the form of ‘calluses’). These cells can be propagated indefinitely in defined synthetic media; when plantlets are desired, some of these cells are taken out and then induced to differentiate into all of the different tissue that makes up a complete plant. The first benefit from the method is that these cells can be maintained in large quantities in very small volumes and can be expanded to hundreds of thousands of cells very quickly, and again, in very small volumes. The second benefit is in scalability; hundreds of thousands of plantlets can be induced in far less time and effort than creating mere hundreds of cuttings. A crucial third benefit of TC over traditional cloning methods is that by stringent control of the maintenance conditions, appropriate growth media additives, and proper handling techniques combined with good facility sanitation practices, strains can be maintained and propagated free of detectable pathogens (TC methods require aseptic handling and the presence of pathogens are readily detected and eliminated).
So now we appreciate that TC can generate vast numbers of identical, healthy “calluses”; how do we go about turning these into plants that we recognize as plants, suitable to move forward to vegetation and flowering stages?
The process generally involves taking callus stock, expanding the number of cells in liquid media as single cells, then plating individual cells in their own culture chambers, then add the appropriate growth factors and hormones that induce them to differentiate into all of the normal tissue types that make up complete plants; as the cells divide they will differentiate into roots, stems, and leaves. Once this differentiation proceeds, they grow into complete plantlets. When these plantlets reach around the 6-8” tall stage, these are then ready to pass on for handling as normal juvenile plants, without any differences in process for subsequent growth.
An added benefit of TC processes is that calluses can be maintained long term without differentiation, at very low cost and low space requirements. Particularly for an operation wanting to maintain multiple strain types for long periods, but able to bring them into production quickly and in large numbers, TC is an economical and reliable solution.
In summary, TC is a well-established method for the retention, clonal expansion, and on-demand production of vast numbers of intrinsically healthy, uniform juvenile plants while offering cost and space savings over traditional methods of any appreciable scale. TC methods are the industry standard for a wide range of agricultural or ornamental plant species – from blueberries to strawberries to birch trees – and going forward as cannabis production becomes mainstream industry and requires the associated scale and uniformity, TC methods will become the obvious method of choice for forward-thinking producers. Whether that comes via development of in-house expertise and infrastructure, or through contracting services out to established TC nurseries, is a matter of choice; but one or the other will surely become the gold standard for cannabis stock maintenance in the very near future.
Wow. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to see that, but it’s impressive. With just being able to ship clones legally it would be enough haha.
Take this one step further, we will soon see artificial seeds using the same methods. GG4 seeds? Yep identical genetic clones from “seed”.
