This is part of a good article on mj genetics and research....it is to long so the link is below
THC is, like, in their genomes, man
How genetics is reshaping the marijuana industry
by
Daniela Hernandez | February 4, 2015
Kent Hernandez/Andy Dubbin
February 4, 2015
Daniela Hernandez
Daniela Hernandez is a senior writer at Fusion. She likes science, robots, pugs, and coffee.
Share the Wealth
Friend's EmailYour EmailHiya. You should drop everything you're doing and read this right now.By submitting above you agree to Fusion's
Privacy Policy
Success!
Your email was sent. =]
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
In 2011, right as the legalization movement was picking up steam in several states, Kevin McKernan left biotech giant Life Technologies, the company that had acquihired him just a few years before. On his way out, he signed a non-compete promising he wouldn’t tinker with any DNA-related projects.
“We couldn’t pick up a pipette,” McKernan recalls, “except for cannabis because they couldn’t touch
that.” He founded
Medicinal Genomics, a company focused on marijuana genetics.
Still, he needed to be cautious. The feds weren’t as tolerant as states like Delaware or Connecticut, which had just passed medical cannabis legalization and marijuana decriminalization laws, respectively. His own state, Massachusetts wouldn’t pass medical marijuana laws until the following year. The lawyers told him to keep his paws off pot, in the U.S. anyway.
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.
1 of 3
The centrifuge that was supposed to help scientists isolate pot DNA pooped out. So, they had to improvise. Photo: Courtesy of Kevin McKernan.
The hotel-room DNA extractions underway. Photo: Courtesy of Kevin McKernan.
Kevin McKernan sets up to quantify how much DNA they have. Photo: Courtesy of Kevin McKernan.
The centrifuge that was supposed to help scientists isolate pot DNA pooped out. So, they had to improvise. Photo: Courtesy of Kevin McKernan.
The hotel-room DNA extractions underway. Photo: Courtesy of Kevin McKernan.
The hotel-room DNA extractions underway. Photo: Courtesy of Kevin McKernan.
McKernan, a Grateful Dead fan, had chosen Chemdawg because story had it that this potent pot strain could
trace its roots back to a 1991 Grateful Dead show during which one DeadHead paid another $500 for some good weed. The pot came with the seeds that would later sprout Chemdawg, though its genetic lineage was still a mystery 20 years later. McKernan posited its “folklore could be cemented [through] genetics,” he said. If all went smoothly, Chemdawg wouldn’t be the only plant to emerge from genetic limbo. Its genome could give McKernan clues about the origins of other strains, and, down the line, maybe even help settle the debate over whether indicas and sativas were one species or two. It would be the first time the plant’s genome was sequenced.
Back in the U.S., he ran the DNA slush through a sequencing machine that spit out hundreds of “reads” — or jumbled snippets — of the Chemdawg genome. Less than three months after leaving Life Technologies, McKernan had the beginnings of a genetic map for cannabis.
Unfortunately, those short chunks of DNA had to be assembled into the full genome, and, at the time, that wasn’t so simple.
The plant’s genetic code is rich in adenine and thymine — two of the four DNA building blocks. Together, they make up roughly 65 percent of cannabis’ nucleotides. In humans, each of the four nucleotides is represented almost evenly. That means when you get cannabis reads back from a sequencing machine, it’s very hard to put them in order, even with the help of computers. Everything looks the same.
“If the jigsaw puzzle all looks blue,” McKernan says, “then your algorithm can’t solve it any better than [humans] can…It became a real mess to try and assemble. We couldn’t get the genome sequence any better. The technology couldn’t make it come together.”
In essence, the valuable information hidden in Chemdawg’s genome was still beyond reach.
He put the data up on the Amazon cloud for anyone to download, hoping someone else might have a successful go at it. Amidst federal government crackdowns on growers, McKernan decided to lay off the pot research, and instead shifted his attention back to sequencing people’s genomes.
From a stoner’s curiosity to science specimen
http://fusion.net/story/40949/marijuana-genetics
cof
you'll have a blast, check out exotic genetics booth (next to clear concentrate) and let me know the selection they have (of that's not too much to ask :/ )
wondering if they are releasing anything new, they have some unique crosses 
