CREATING THE CANNABIS OFTHE FUTURE As legalization of recreational marijuana approaches, breeders and others are looking to a future where cannabis seed will play a major role. Marc Zienkiewicz RECREATIONAL MARIJUANA IS on the verge of being legalized in Canada, and the future of the product represents a major oppor- tunity for the seed sector. “If you look in the crystal ball, five to seven years from now, most cannabis will be grown from seed. We’re talking about huge poten- tial on the seed side,” says Ian Davidson, chief agriculture officer for the Richmond, B.C.-based Segra, a tissue culture company specializing in cannabis. The company is currently developing cannabis micropropa- gation nurseries to serve large- scale producers in Canada and the United States, specifically California. According to Davidson, who founded Biologic Systems, a California-based wholesale farm supply company that primarily serves organic medical cannabis producers across the U.S. West Coast, the coming legalization of recreational marijuana in Canada and the legalization of the product in nine American states means the time has arrived for recreational cannabis to be fully understood from a genetic perspective, as has been done with industrial hemp. The end goal, of course, is the development of cannabis seed that will be used to produce the mari- juana of the future. According to Davidson, future cannabis will be consumed in its various extracted parts, something that seed is heav- ily geared toward. “There won’t be as much con- sumer demand to have a flower that is uniform, and that will take the pressure off the cultivator to have a uniform crop,” he says. “Because of the global political situation, no one has been able to legally do the proper work around cannabis breeding. That’s what’s happening now. We need to really understand this plant and how it functions.” Background Check To understand how seed will come to play such a crucial role in the future of cannabis, it helps to under- stand why plant breeders don’t have a full understanding of marijuana and its genetic makeup. “There’s no scientifically accepted genome for cannabis,” Davidson says. Research like that happening at Segra is yielding new insights into the cannabis plant. Segra is develop- ing proprietary methods to perform genetic fingerprint identification on outgoing tissue culture plantlets des- tined for large-scale cultivation. This will serve as a key quality assurance process for customers. Cannabis strain identification (known as “strain fingerprinting” and matching) can be accomplished with genotyping technology only. Segra’s lab, which opened in December 2017, will be able to iden- tify critical genetic markers in young developing plantlets. This allows for the early removal of undesir- able plants from breeding programs, thereby saving significant time and resources and, in effect, speeding up the breeding process. 16 GERMINATION.CA MARCH 2018