Genetics and Cannabinoid Profiles Interview with Zacariah Hildenbrand and Adam Jacques

In this interview, Zacariah Hildenbrand, PhD, partner of Medusa Analytical, LLC Adam Jacques, Geneticist and Cultivator of Big Earth Consulting, share on how cannabis genetics play a significant role in cannabinoids found in the plant.

Transcript:

Madeline Colli: Do genetics affect cannabinoid profiles in the plant?

Zacariah Hildenbrand: Oh, yeah, there's no doubt about that. And one thing that we were pushing genetically in our last project was looking at the ancillary cannabinoids. So THCV, there's a lot been made about that in terms of it being a metabolic stimulant, being used, perhaps in the treatment of metabolic syndrome or diabetes. We were also very interested, and I think Adam still has some of the highest CBC content in flower. So this is a neuro protected molecule, so we're looking at something that beyond THC or CBD. Now, CBC could be a real, it's one of the kind of intermediate/major cannabinoids, but we only have, like, 1% and Adam, was able to push that much higher, and so maybe we have a strain that could come out to help people with neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. And you know, that's why we really got into this, is to make novel medicines. Genetics plays a major role.

Zacariah Hildenbrand: We were also exploring the epigenetic effects. So basically, you produce a plant, and then, as you're growing that next generation of plants based on the environmental stimuli that they receive that affects how the genes are going to be expressed in subsequent generations. This is work that in the last 30 years, they've made a lot of progress, which is to say, like, "if I smoke cigarettes and I abuse alcohol, that will actually impact the genetics of my children and may even impact the genetics of my grandchildren." Everything is interrelated, and these environmental effects are actually quite profound. And so that's where we were really playing around with a lot of different variables, such as light, soil quality, additive quality, water quality, and, we were able to tease out some really some interesting things. Adam talk a little bit more about your your CBC genetics, because I know, just with all the testing that we did, we started basically where everyone else was sub 1% and then we're able to push it magnitudes higher.

Adam Jacques: Yeah, CBC, has been very important to me. I had three grandparents die from Alzheimer's disease, and so the idea of something that would improve neuroplasticity and maybe even be a neuro protector, and it was extremely unbelievable to me to be found in the cannabis plant. But if it was there, we were going to fight it and run it down. It's very exciting. Looking through type one, two and three, CBC expresses itself at the same rates, regardless of what type of cannabis, even type four and CBG, it expresses itself in the same way.

Adam Jacques: We were looking at it on the idea was, is that it as far as like degradation of CBG goes? Where does this fall on the chain? And so when you start looking at things like that, what you're trying to figure out is, "Is this something that I can actively breed for, like, a CBD to THC transition?" Or is it like auto flowering? For generational breeding, when you're looking at how genetics work, you're trying to find out what's recessive. How to get it it really it just turned into CBC with a stacking method. We would start looking at plant material early in growth, fifth, the seventh node, that's when we start seeing mature leaves and we would start doing pretesting on them, looking for a spike in the CBC point. It was tough. The degradation happens much later in the plant. So, we weren't able to identify the CBC content until finished flower, really, to get an idea of where the percentages were at. Then we would keep clones of everything that we pop seeds of, we would grow everything out, and then the one clone that tested a little bit higher than everybody else would stay. Over three years, we redid this over and over and over again, and we went from 0.7% to 0.8% to 3.2%.

Zacariah Hildenbrand: It's like you're, you're breeding giraffes, right? And so you take the giraffes with the tallest neck, and then you interbreed those. And then you make another 100 giraffes, and then you find the one with the longest neck, and you breed that with the one that has the second longest neck, and then it just goes up.

Zacariah Hildenbrand: But, that sense, it's very simple Mendelian genetics, where Gregor Mendel is the one that basically put two plants together, a white plant and a red plant, and then found, oh, we have these pink plants, and these are interesting. We were able to follow this at an accelerated pace just by running high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), basically doing cannabinoid profiling of 500 plants a day, every day, and I think we, speculated Adam, in your days of starting with high CBD genetics and where you took those strains with Lenny's lion and whatnot. I mean, if you had had an HPLC in your basement, you would have cut your development time by 10 fold, right? I mean, because you were, you were collecting measurements and isolating unique strains that you thought phenotypically were unique, then sending that off for lab testing, which in 2015/2016 wasn't great, certainly not where it is today,

Adam Jacques: It was almost non existent.

Zacariah Hildenbrand: That was in the "what is CBD?" phase. It's actually this really cool molecule. And then, obviously when we were doing these genetic experiments, we were on the back end of the CBD craze in 2019 and 2020, and no one was talking about CBC.

Adam Jacques: CBC and CBL, which I think are both very, very interesting, get very little love. Manny over at Cannamatrix, though I've been talking to him, he's all about it. He wants us to bring our genetic library in there and do all the testing and stuff. So I've been talking to those guys.

Zacariah Hildenbrand: There's still fertile ground to make massive discoveries in this field. I mean, I got into this in 2015 and I thought we were just kind of crawling out of the primordial ooze. I would have thought by this time, 10 years later, that all this would have been covered up by biopharmaceutical industry, and they'd be growing in million square foot greenhouses, and this would have been dialed in with some of the best analytical chemists, and we're still not there. There's still tremendous room for discovery to be made and I think we're still just scratching the star. I think we've only made 2 or 3% of the actual discoveries that are out there. There's just so much more to do.