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Cannabis genes key to long-term success


Canada positioned to be a world leader in cannabis genetics by PETER MITHAM


ABBOTSFORD—Cannabis has been in short supply in many jurisdictions across Canada in the months since recreational sales became legal last October. Now, with edibles set to hit the market in time for Christmas and total legal cannabis sales set to top $1.5 billion nationally according to US market research firms Arcview Market Research and BDS Analytics, products are reaching for new highs.


Refining existing strains


and developing new ones to supply the legal market is the focus of a 21,000-square-foot research facility Aurora Cannabis Inc. is building in Comox. Total cost of the lab, which is set to open this summer, is pegged at $20 million. The project is led by Greg Baute, director of plant


breeding and genetics for Aurora, who worked with sunflowers prior to shifting into cannabis. “People selected intentionally, or unintentionally, for traits that make the plant better,” he told participants in Cannatech West at the Pacific Agriculture Show in Abbotsford earlier this year, outlining the typical pattern for domesticated crops such as sunflowers. “Usually what they ended up with was bigger plants that flowered later, bigger flowers and bigger fruits. And this has definitely happened with cannabis.”


But the degree of


improvement that transformed other crops over the last 150 years bypassed cannabis. “In cannabis, it’s essentially been illegal to do breeding in Canada,” he said. The result was that crop


COUNTRY LIFE IN BC • JULY 2019


FILE PHOTO


improvement was left to amateur growers, who remain the key breeders. “There’s no public


resources, really,” Baute said, noting that this has its advantages. “I don’t think that there’s any other crop genetics community that is as well-demeanoured to newcomers.” Most important for


researchers is the abundance of open-source documentation. “There’s been a lot of


efforts to make nice reference genomes for cannabis, and we’re seeing more come out


now,” he said. “There’s actually published pedigrees for the vast majority of material that’s out there, which is amazing, and something I would have loved to have had for my thesis work in sunflower.” The documentation is the cornerstone of what he says has to be done to deliver the kinds of varieties needed as the industry matures. “A good genome assembly is paramount to all the work that goes downstream with this,” he said.


But a major problem facing the industry is the lack of consistent identification of what consumers are getting. The same name might be applied to two strains of cannabis, even though each have unique pedigrees. Baute showed the


pedigrees for two strains labelled Blue Dream by two different seed distributors; he also showed pedigrees for three different Sour Diesels from three different seed distributors, also with three different pedigrees. “To me, strain name is not


super-informative,” he said. “There’s a problem for producers – there’s really no predictability how a clone is going to perform when you grow it.”


The bigger issue, he said, is


for consumers who might be relying on the name of a strain to indicate a particular effect. “We know these different


flowers have different effects on people. People will have different experiences based on what they get,” he said. “I


think it’s really important, especially for [medical] patients, to have a predictability.” The result is that the more than 500 different strains of cannabis Aurora has amassed for its innovation centre may require closer study. “We thought we had 550


different things … but clones have passed around so much and names have been changed,” he said. “To help fix some of these problems – the inconsistencies of genetics – we want to be able to produce consistent phenotypes.” The new facility in Comox


is designed to address breeding issues. “We’re going to have


special zones for disease control, so we’ll be able to intentionally infect our plants and screen for disease tolerance,” he said. “We’ll have specific zones for air handling, so we can do pollinations at scale, and then a big part of it is basically a production/ realistic growth space, where we can imitate what different producers are doing.”


The ultimate goal will be to


develop strains with specific chemistries and higher yields than those currently available. “There’s a lot to do in terms


of producing enough of this plant for Canadian consumption,” he said. “The thing that excites me as a scientist is the technology aspect. Canada is really positioned to invest and figure out technology for this crop that can set it as a world- leader.”


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