Cannabis Genome, Diversity, and Legal Challenges: Interview with Daniela Vergara, PhD

Sebastian Krawiec: Now, when you started kind of researching cannabis genomics, what were some of the kind of takeaways, what were some of the things you learned from that? What are some of the things you know, what were your goals as you were kind of studying the genomics and, you know, the work that needed to be done in cannabis at that time?

Daniela Vergara: That's a loaded question, because so first, it was actually my husband's idea to work with cannabis. He was like, "when we moved here all the way, because cannabis is legal and and why sunflowers? No one cares about sunflowers. Why not cannabis?" So in any case, that's how it started. This was a Friday night, and so that weekend, Saturday and Sunday, I went online and I looked up the resources that were available. And for me, kind of this has always been a plant that is so common, right? And everyone uses it, so at least that's what I thought back then. Now things have changed, but the way everything should be known about this plant, which was totally not true, because of illegality, right?

Then there was a genome that was sequenced by a group in Canada that was led by Jonathan Page, who's one of the big cannabis researchers. He had a paper, where he was a senior author, I believe, van Bakel, et al, 2011 where theysequenced the genome, and they had an assembly. Assembly is when you kind of put the genome together into, you know, like a puzzle, right? You take all of the little pieces after sequencing, and you kind of build a puzzle, and the puzzle was very fragmented, right? So just imagine that your puzzle is just little pieces, but it's not close together, it has a ton of gaps, so it was very fragmented.

So there was something that could be done there, and we did. I started working with Steep Hill, they wanted me to work with the cannabinoid gene. So first, I was working again in host parasite coevolution when I was in Indiana, and that there's a big question in evolutionary biology in general that Darwin himself posed, which is, 'why do organisms reproduce sexually,' right? Why are there males and why are there females? Why do females not clone?

One of the answers, which was the one that I was related to, is because you need diversity to escape from parasite pressure, especially if you have a very virulent disease. A disease that kills you or a disease that castrates you, and your fitness is going to be zero. One of the reasons to have variation, and guess what? Males provide that diversity, right? That's why you and your brother are different. Unless you're identical twins.

So, I was coming with that mindset, and I was really intrigued by the fact that cannabis has males and has females, but it also has malicious individuals. And in plants, you don't see that, that often. Plants are usually, you have the perfect flower where you have the male parts and the female parts.

But in cannabis, you don't have that. You have something that is called dioecy, where you have males and females. And I just got a paper published on that, actually, on a review on on dioecine cannabis and what's out there. So, that was what intrigued me the most. I did not realize that working with cannabis was going to be such a hassle, right? That one of the first things that I had to do was meet with lawyers. It's like, well, we're downloading data from the internet, right? This is DNA. Could be an elephant. It could be a palm tree. You just see on the on the screen ATGCs, millions and millions of them.

In any case, I didn't realize that it was gonna be a legal issue, that everyone had opinions. Everyone has opinions, right? Everyone, like your neighbor, probably has opinions. And not only that, but also, well, the legality, but also that it was an entire industry. This was an entire industry where you have accountants, architects, engineers, and marketers. I had never met a marketer in my life before, until I started. I didn't realize that it was an entire industry. For me, it was a plant, and instead of growing a tomato or like your plant in the living room, it was cannabis. All of those things started shifting while I started working.

Krawiec: It's really interesting. Like, when you think about genetics particularly, I mean, it exists in other spaces, but particularly in cannabis, genetics is a really, like, a lot of it is about branding, right?

Vergara: Yes.

Krawiec: It's fascinating.

Vergara: I think it's interesting. I think it's funny because at the end of the day, for me, the names do not mean much, right? And then it's like, okay, so what strain is this? And it's like, well, it's the strain Pepe Le Pew. Doesn't really matter. Do you want to change the name? You can change it. Sure, change it. Then when I say these things out loud to people, because throughout my research, we've found that many of the strains are misnamed. So you have a blue dream that's more closely related to something else.

People are very attached to their names. And I kind of in a way I understand it because your name's Sebastian, and you're not named John, and your parents named you Sebastian, right? And if your middle name is John, because your grandfather was named John. So that name means something to someone. That doesn't mean that you're related to another Sebastian, at all. You are not related whatsoever. And in cannabis, is the same situation.

There are some strains that you do see that. Maybe these were clones because they're closely related, but for many, I participated in, 'let's name this strain'. And then it's like, 'Oh, it smells like mango. Let's call it Mango Tango', right? That's how the name was born and then the best name gets a t-shirt. At the end of the day, those names really do not mean much. When people ask me those, I'm just like, 'Yeah, sure. Is this an indica or is this a sativa? What do you want it to be?' I said, 'Well, it's a hybrid'. That's exactly it. It's a hybrid. And I tell people rename, it. You won the High Times Cup last year. Just rename it and rebrand it. And then sometimes people take this as I'm being offensive. I'm like, No, doesn't mean much. Just rename it and then win it again.

Krawiec: How does that in terms of, like, genetic diversity of cannabis is like, I mean, that must be interesting from a genetics perspective, but then, like, does it like become a hassle as a researcher and how you study it?

Vergara: Yes because there's a lot of diversity. So according to my rough estimates cannabis could have as much diversity as I mean, there's other species that have as much diversity, but probably two times or three times as much as the human species. So it is pretty diverse. It does make it difficult, for example, to put the assembly, the puzzle together, because sometimes you don't know, it's hard to differentiate whether these are two different alleles, right? So these are two different forms of the same gene. It's the same gene, but the two different forms I want from mom and from dad are so different from each other, that you think that they are two different genes. So it's like, 'okay, so this is one gene, this is another gene'. And then you can see that in the assemblies that are out there. There's probably 15 right now that are that are out there. And since 2011, well, I started working this in 2013, 2014, since then to now. There's been a ton of new resources and the assemblies have gotten so much better. So, so, so much better. There's still a ton of work to do, but, there's really good assemblies now.

If you see the assemblies that are right now, you can see how the improvements have been done. But I was with Steep Hill, for example. We tried to assemble a male, a pineapple, banana, Baba Kush. Back in 2017, or so around that time, and we depended on a grower that was growing it for us. Because we're in a university, so we depended like it was, many things were out of our hands. Then when we sequenced it and we tried to assemble it, it was a mess. It turns out that the guy had decided, he told us that it was a fourth generation inbred, which makes it easier when you have inbreeding to do an assembly. But it turns out that he had decided at the last time to cross it with something else, so it was a mess. It was out of our hands. Until then, we did the best we could do, but at the end of the day, that assembly is a very fragmented assembly for that reason, so it is what it is.