Welcome to the cannabis data science meetup group. You're in for one of the best treats
ever today. This may be the best meetup to date. Can't thank you enough for attending
to make this happen. We've been talking a lot about the top issues for cannabis cultivators
and one that's come up over and over again is this issue with Popsley in thyroid. Well,
these awesome scientists at My Florida DNA, a biotech genomics lab in California, Dr.
Angel Fernandez and Dr. Ajit Anand want to share some of their latest research and they're
open to field some of the questions we may have because we all come at this group from
our different perspectives. And so now this is an awesome opportunity for us to actually
ask and hear from some of the leading scientists in the field to find out what is this issue
with Popsley in thyroid all about. So let everybody have a chance to chime in and ask
questions here in a second. But without further ado, Dr. Fernandez or Dr. Anand, would you
want to take it away and let us know about some of your research?
Yes. Can you hear us please? Yes? Okay. So thank you very much for having us. As you
said, we are a molecular biology lab, a genomics lab located in Sacramento in California, just
in the middle of the most affected region in the world for whole Latin Birolite. Our
main goal is to offer diagnostic services to farmers and growers. We develop a technology
that allows us to analyze several thousand samples on a daily basis with an accuracy
of around 97, 98 percent. We are working actually, we can analyze those plants in a few hours.
So that is very convenient because the clients, they can get the results basically in two
days. The process takes longer actually when they see the plants to our lab rather than
the analysis itself. So for the past year, we have already analyzed around 275,000 samples
and we are continuously improving our protocol in order to lower the price. We know that
this is a very big issue in the industry. We know the economical difficulties that our
clients are suffering. So all the improvements that we are making is basically to lower the
price so that eventually will be translated in a larger volume of samples that they can
analyze. So whole Latin Birolite is a Birolite that actually is the equivalent to what happened
a few years ago with COVID in humans. What we recommend to the clients is to test in
a regular basis. The plant today might be healthy but tomorrow might be infected without
showing any visual symptoms. However, the Birolite might be present in their facilities
and it's very easy to spread to the other plants. So that's why our recommendation
is to keep testing at least two or three times for the whole cycle of the plant.
This is phenomenal that you're undertaking this research and testing to help people out.
I've got a myriad of questions but before I start bombarding questions on you and start
fielding questions from the audience, Dr. Anand, would you want to maybe tell us a bit
about your role and maybe what are some of the challenges with testing? You said you're
doing north of 270,000 lab tests. So that is a well of data right there. So that's a
thought that comes to mind. So I'll be formalizing my thoughts. But you're welcome to chime in,
Dr. Anand. And then maybe we can open it up to some questions.
Sure. Thank you. Thank you all. Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to see so many different
people. I've never met many of you but I know you all are one of the best people who are
working on cannabis. I entered into the cannabis industry just a couple of years back so I'm
still learning a lot. For me, when I moved to give you background, I'm a molecular biologist.
I was one of the leading technologies for the seed companies before I moved into cannabis.
I was working for the largest seed company, the US. My background is in functional genomics,
biotechnology, you name it, a lot of things that I've done with microbial engineering
and so forth and so on. What fascinated me about cannabis and you might ask me this question,
hey, what are you doing in this crop? Is that the fact that cannabis is growing, it's getting
a lot of traction and it's one of the 56 largest crop now in the US from the value perspective.
So there is a lot more to be done. There's a lot of information that's been exchanged
between the community but we also need a rigorous data-driven science-based approach to resolve
some of the significant problems that we see. One of the challenges we discuss broadly and
quite often is the HLVD. To just give you about HLVD, HLVD is half-latent virite. Obviously,
it's a half virite. To tell you about virite, virite is like naked RNA molecule, one of
the smallest infectious molecule that primarily only infects plant. That's a good thing about
it. Many aspects of the half-latent virite, I personally have learned in the last six
to seven months. We are still trying to figure out, we are learning each and every step through
the efforts that are put by other organizations like us from the academia. Basically, what
we are doing is using those learning opportunities to actually support the community with solutions
that actually create value for the crops. Obviously, everybody talks about economical
losses and economical losses are not just for cannabis. We have serious issues with
drought in the Midwest today with all the row crops that you can talk about. There are
going to be both biotic and abiotic stresses. The biotic are the pathogens and other things
and abiotic are other stresses which I think we will also have eventually getting into
cannabis. What I feel is we are just on the tip of the iceberg about when it comes to
a crop like cannabis. I personally want to use my know-how building those capacities
in large organizations, bring those intellectual knowledge, bring those experiences to cannabis
and drive to broaden the knowledge on cannabis and also drive services and solutions that
actually are attractive and effective to the growers, the breeders and as well as the nurseries
and cultivators. That is what I am here for. I will talk about the little work we have
done on HLVD. I wanted to give you about a little background on HLVD. HLVD is very serious
problem and when you talk about serious problem, I will just put some value. This is all in
the literature or it has been documented. One of the things is we believe that it is
90 to 95% of all the cannabis that we grow in California which is the hardwood we are
sitting is either infected or had been infected in the past. The cost associated with this
worldwide and it is not a problem in the US a lot. It is a worldwide problem. When it
comes to the number of strains, in an example that Angel gave about COVID, we have so many
strains and today a new strain is getting a booster bill for that. The lucky thing about
this worldwide is the quasi-species of the different types of strains that are infected
are limited to two and they are very, very small changes. As I said, this is small RNA.
It is just like around 256 nucleotides. It is much smaller to what our whole genome is
or even a plant genome. Just for a comparison, I would say like the virus, if I were to say
it is a dot, then the viruses are a little point. It is almost 100 times larger than
a virus. If you look at a spore like a fungal spore, it is around 100x larger than a virus.
You can see with the naked eye or use a microscope to see a spore, a fungal spore, whether it
is aspergillus or it is fusarium, but you need very sophisticated electron microscopy
instruments to see a virus. That is about the virus. The effective loss, the economic
loss that is caused by the virus is estimated to be 4 billion globally. We are talking about
a crop which is 5 to 6 billion in the US and we are talking about 4 billion globally analyzed
large that can happen from a virus like HLVD. You feel like, isn't it silly that this little
species that cannot even survive by its own is able to now get into a plant, piggyback
on the plant, use the host machinery and replicate and present the phenotype as a disease. The
disease often people know in the community is dudding or duds. The dudding and duds disease
can be easily seen with the stunted growth, the flower quality, the brittleness of the
plant. Sometimes there is yellowing or darkening of the leaf, but the most common phenotype
which is very visually noticed is if the disease is expressed, the phenotype is seen, the plant
will be stunted and duded. We all know that if the plant is stunted and duded or much
smaller, your yield from that crop is going to be significantly reduced. Another interesting
aspect about this HLVD is now it doesn't necessarily express every time. We know in plants that
is genotype dependency and the resistance or tolerance to diseases. Many times the disease
is not even expressed. You will think about the plant as being growing normal and we have
a practice of using mother plants and making cuttings and rooting. Unknowingly, without
knowing that the mother plant is infected, you're making cuttings and then you're basically
disseminating. Then could there be an environmental effect or could there be another issue with
another pathogen that the plant starts expressing itself and now you realize, oh my God, I've
already lost a lot of my plants because now all these plants are infected. This is one
of the most effective ways of disseminating the disease. Unawareness, unknowingly cutting
and then putting it to footprint. I want all you folks to understand that that's something
that we have to proactively think about, especially in cultivation or necessary practice where
you're using other plants. I would recommend, my best recommendation or medication would
be is be proactive in testing all the mother plants, making sure that you have done it
through different growth stages, that you're not missing the opportunity to cut something
that could have been done much earlier in the beginning. Latency is a good thing I talked
about where you can't know the disease. The other interesting is the effect on the economical
value comes from the flowers that you produce. There is very clear documentation that plants
which are infected may have up to 50% reduction or greater than that in their cannabinoid
composition. The flowers are actually a little more brittle. They're not compact. If you
run through a seed, you can see the flow down. I give you a broad perspective and again I
want to open up with what my thoughts were here so that we can have some good interactive
session here.
Phenomenal Dr. Anand. I love it. I love your work. I kind of want to maybe break this down
into three segments and then we can ask questions about those. Basically, I see this as where
did the hopslate in viroid originate? How did it take root? Quite literally. That's
such a problem in the cannabis industry. Then two, I guess focus on what does this actually
look like? You've already kind of spoken a bit about that. What are the effects of hopslate
in viroid? How can you potentially spot it, identify it? Then the final thing is the solutions
which I think is what your company is really working on is the testing. I kind of wanted
to pick your brain on this and then maybe if anybody else has any questions about the
origins of hopslate in viroid in the cannabis space. I just was doing a brief poke at the
research. I'm just going to put them in the chat here so people can look at them just
for official sources. From what I was reading, and so let me know if this is wrong, it was
looking like hopslate in viroid was first detected in cannabis maybe around 2017 or
early 2018. I was basically looking for ground zero. The earliest mention I could find was
just a case that appeared to be in Oakland in perhaps an indoor grow. Then they mentioned
another case in 2018 in Santa Barbara. What comes to my mind is what are your best ideas
or thoughts on how did hopslate in viroid take root in the cannabis industry? What maybe
made some of the first growers susceptible? Did the fact that cannabis is kind of an illegal
gray area, did that have any influence? Maybe people weren't following the best procedures
or maybe it's got something to do with the strains or the cloning. I don't know. What
are your thoughts? Why did this, maybe the cannabis industry was just right for this,
but why this particular virus and why do you think it took off like it did? That's my guess.
My origin question.
Well, thanks for asking that question. That's a million dollar question. I would say that
we still are able to, we don't know we have an answer for it. I would just give you the
pre-historical thing. The pre-historical thing that I want people to remember is it is a
hop Latin viroid. It was first identified in the 1985-87 time, something around that,
in hops in Spain. So Northern Spain is where it was first. Now, how did it move? How did
it reach?
Let me add, in Spain about 30 years ago, so it's been around for more than 30 years, actually
almost 40 years. So it was first identified and published in 1987.
So it would have been there even before that. I'm saying that the fun thing is we have to
go back and rethink about who, it has been here for almost 40 years, even 50 years. Detections
were, I mean, again, this is a biological system, which is not like you can do any,
like indexing or something that pathologists do because the viroid cannot live and needs
to have a host. So it's probably there for a long time. The other beautiful thing about
it is it's got a very narrow host. Narrow host where probably it expresses as a phenotype.
It doesn't mean that we know that we today understand is it only those three hosts or
is it actually present in other plant species but does not have a disease, right? It doesn't
express the disease.
So the hosts are like a couple of different hop varieties. Then there is this stinking
needle and now we have cannabis, obviously. Now, how did it move from Spain to California
or it was already present in Europe? People went unnoticed and it was just that we happened
to start noticing a plant phenotype in the maybe the late 2017s. I know the first report
was something around 2018, 2019, where two groups simultaneously came and reported it.
But it must have been here. Somebody really paid attention and then tried to identify
what's that hop, right? Hemp and hop are closely related if you look at that too. Now, one
of the most likely, again, I'm not an epidemiologist, I'm not a plant pathologist, so don't take
my word with like, it's a grain of salt, let's say. It's likely it got cross-infected. And
somehow the population moved here. And that's why we say US has a very strong quarantine
when you bring seeds or plants, anything from foreign countries. This is exactly a great
example of something that probably got in a ship, got an airplane and reached here.
Now that is my understanding, but I again want to make sure that people understand I'm
giving a hypothesis. I don't have any supporting data or something to prove that's the only
possible way it reached. It could have also come with seed because now we have heard about
even seed can transmit it and that's more of a latest knowledge. So I would open it
up for people to figure out what exactly happened, but we know that we started seeing this disease
in the cultivation parts of California, in the Santa Barbara area, and eventually now
all of California probably has it in the early 20, 70s and 80s, I mean, 2018 to be more precise.
May I cut in for a sec? This is John Abrams. So I became familiar with this in 2016 with
my work in Humboldt. The name associated with this was Rick Crumb. There was a report, in
fact, I think we presented in 2017 at MJ Biz on what this viroid was. We didn't know it
was a viroid at that time. We were calling it PCIA, putative cannabis infectious agent,
and then we were going to try and identify what it was molecularly. We left that to others
and the story is as you said. The index strain, as we remember in Humboldt in about this time,
was GG4 or Gorilla Glue. And so it was intriguing and of course Humboldt cultivation being what
it is, this is kind of how it spread. So anyways, I would call your attention to presentations
at the MJ Biz Science Symposium and I think it's 2017, but it reflects the story starting
in 2016.
Thank you, John. That's a good thing that you brought to me again. As in the beginning,
I said, I'm learning a lot of things about this viroid.
May I ask another more broad question regarding your discussion of its etiology coming out
of Northern Spain? And I guess that's a cannabis, not a hemp derivative, but a cannabis derivative
report. My thinking is that this has been circulating a lot longer. There were reports
of hemp diebacks in the literature. What I particularly remember is at the time of the
Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, there was a report strangely of hemp was a major
cultivar in Hungary during that time and it took a beating. Same thing in Serbia, if I
remember correctly. So my major question is if this has been circulating for a lot longer,
I'm wondering if the current hemp strains, there were a number of classic hemp cultivars,
they have some endogenous resistance that is worth understanding or looking at.
Okay, John, I completely agree with you. When you mentioned about the inherent genotype
specific resistance or genotype specific exclusion, not expressing the phenotype, that's not only
unique for this. I think the whole world understands how wild germ plasms and germ plasms have
helped to identify and breed for those resistance in other crops. So it may be a great opportunity
for us to go and see if we can actually systematically do this study and identify the cultivars.
I would more or less say, I don't like to say resistance or tolerance more or less.
Identify those in genetics or germ plasms, which are actually much more tolerant to this
HLVD and then incorporate that into our breeding programs. We can then mechanistically identify
if there is a specific gene or specific QTL or a specific mechanism, which could be an
RNA silencing mechanism that allows that particular plant to overcome the disease or doesn't
allow the viral to amplify or increase the titer that results in a disease.
Sorry, John. So what is clear is that more research is needed and also even to find out
the origin. What we are saying is that what has been documented is that in Spain in 1987
was identified in hop. But I'm pretty sure I agree with you. Probably 30, 40 years, even
before that was already in Russia, in Serbia, in East European countries and even in Asia.
So for that, I mean, there are today we have molecular tools that we can use to identify
the real origin and even to retrieve to know the exact date or year or, you know, a presumptive
year of the spread and origin of this. But the problem that we are facing in cannabis,
all of us, is that we are less than 20 organizations worldwide, including public and private organizations
doing research. This is a very novel topic. And when we compare the research done cannabis
versus the rest of the crops, tomatoes, soybeans, almonds, whatever, for similar pathogens or
any other trade, obviously they are 50 years ahead of us in research. So what he was mentioning
about the germoplasm, wild species, wild ecotypes, that is extremely important to analyze those
genetics and trying to breathe them or incorporate the genes into the domesticated or the standard
cannabis that we are using today.
I just wanted to add to the comment is that the fact that we haven't got as much excitement
for cannabis across the public institutions, so because of the current regulatory regimes,
it hasn't really attracted our universities to do as simple fundamental basic research
that happens with most of the other crops. And lack of that has also limited our expansion
in the industry as well, because now industries are working with limited amount of funds.
And obviously we have to do things that we can educate the community also, but at the
same time provide a way of generating revenue for the organization to survive. So we can
use many of the other crop models, as I was saying, the amount of work that I was doing
in the raw crops to sort of streamline the science-based research on cannabis, but we
have to take a village to do it together. It may not be a single institution that can
be able to achieve those things. But understanding how this wire art originated, how it spread,
I think again, going back to those wild germ plasma, if they are still maintained, somebody
has seed, we may be able to really go back and figure it out because of the modern genomic
tools. And this is a small wire art like 256 nucleotides. We can do a million of those
seeds being sequenced for this just in a day. That's the power we have to do, the tools
we have to do.
I may just chime in with the thought because that snippet of information that John said,
that this may have been prevalent in gorilla glue. That may kind of tie a lot together
and piggyback on some of your work over at MyFloridna. Because what I'm thinking now,
especially since you're saying that this virus may have been around for 40 plus years, is
there was sort of a fun article that came out recently that was saying that they're
finding these ancient viruses that are getting thawed out in the permafrost. And so what
comes to my mind is probably these viruses in hemp have kind of been co-evolving just
for probably a long time.
Let me finish this and then I'll let you chime in Dr. Anand. And then so for whatever
reason, probably because cannabis has been pretty underground in the United States, my
guess is cultivators have had to rely a lot on clones. And then we've discussed in the
past somebody discovered this one variety, gorilla glue, and for a number of reasons
it's just become insanely popular. We were seeing that it's by and for the top selling
strain in Washington state. And then that's not even including all the different varieties
it's been mixed with. So it could just be that this one variety was selected. Unfortunately,
that one variety was super susceptible to the virus and then it's just been cloned and
spread. And then this kind of piggybacks on the question in the comments is, you know,
are clones really being tested? So those are more thoughts rather than questions.
But I think maybe you had something to chime in with Dr. Anand.
I wanted to go back to what you said. You know, it may have been, but the answer is
it is been there over 40 years because we know the earliest documentation is 1987. So
we had just shot a 14 years today. And when a disease is discovered, it's only when somebody
really noticed and this emphasis wants to know exactly is going. So which tells you
it could have been there even earlier than that. It's only the diagnostics and our capability
of being able to identify this came with the sophistication of instruments that we had
by then. So again, think about looking for a 256 nucleotide virus. I'm thinking about
my 1987, I'm still in school probably. I was doing much more laborious way of detecting
a DNA when I came to school in the 1990s. But our detection capabilities may not have
been that. So again, we might have used classical processes for identifying these diseases at
that point, you know, by cross-infecting and there are ways that people do that.
So the second comment of whether the virus has been sort of emerging. The point I mentioned
is even though the virus has been collected 50 or 60 different strains have been identified.
The thing is they all seem to have are very stable. We're not seeing very quasi species
of RNA, which is third in other virus that also has infecting plants and PSL, it is one
of the more PSS TV is one of the most extensively studied. That's a good news. The good news
is most of the virus that are infecting are still belonging to the two class that I said
can one and can two. And they're infected. And whether they're infected, they're present
in the US and they also present globally. And the third question or comment that was
about clones, I think that is imperative. That is what I think is an important thing.
Testing where you get the clones, who provides the clone, I think is the best step. So I
would say that, you know, to be able to do that early enough is the best mode of preventing
the disease proactively testing clones before they are grown and multiple stages. Like even
when you get a clone, don't just wait for the first few leaves and test it because our
study tells it pretty clearly that if you wait a little longer, you do it every weekly
or bi weekly. Even if the virus is at low titles, they're going to increase over a period
of a couple of weeks and which would have been not detected. Now would have identified
as an infected plant. So having something would I call it. Yeah. I have something called
an SOP of pest management practices, a cultivation management practice will help us avoid the
virus load. And again, Angel, please go ahead. Yes. Because I read a question in the chat
asking if the, all the clones sold in California are being tested for first for HLV. Well,
so this is one of our recommendation that even a grower buys for tissue culture labs,
the clones and even if those tissue culture they have tested, they had done the test,
the testing for HLV at that earliest stage, they might be negative. Then two, two, three
weeks later, the vital load can increase, right? And become positive the plant. So our
recommendation to the growers is just randomly select a few plants to make sure that everything
is clean and the infectational level is 0%. I mean, based on statistics and based on the
numbers of plants that they will get from the, from the tissue culture or their nurseries.
And to make an analogy of that is again, I go back to the COVID era where we all have
tested on weekly, monthly basis to make sure that the population, the amount of infection
that we have in the population is reduced. So I think this is exactly Angel, what is
it is that you have to have a routine testing plan and we are here to help it. We have solutions
that we want to provide on site so that you are capable of making all those decisions
and necessarily as supporting you. So this is similar to a problem in straight
out mammalian cell biotechnology that has been solved, I would say years ago, when you're
propagating transfected or recombinant mammalian cells for blockbuster biologic drugs worldwide,
you have to make sure that your endogenous retroviruses and all that are not brought
forward into your culture systems. So it is very standard to create master cell banks
and working cell banks that go through elaborate characterization to make sure it's clean and
free of infectious agents and virus. This is standard practice in the biotechnology
industry and there are organizations that are very good at running these tests. My view
is we have to do the same thing in cannabis if we want to go forward with this. And it
comes to the major question of creating master cell banks of, I've always been a fan of protoplasts
to do this. The technology is not there yet, but you would have a well characterized protoplast
master cell bank and then you would come out of that and use best practices to keep this
down. The paradigm is in biotech, in mammalian scale up cell culture biotech. I think we
have to do the same thing here. John, I totally agree with your comment and
thanks for putting it. I think this is what we normally say seed banks when it comes to
plant germplasm and we have seed banks like the UC Davis has seed banks for hemp. There
is a seed bank for hemp in I think University of Washington. Yeah, in Cornell I met also
another gentleman in one of the conferences that they have also started going and collecting
seeds from different places. Yeah, you're right John.
But I think it has to be beyond seeds. I think you actually have to go to tissue culture
based cell banking in this case because I think it's difficult. How do you screen seeds
effectively? It's a destructive analysis. Once you've taken a seed and tried to analyze
it for viroid presence, it's not a seed anymore. True.
What I'm saying is getting the quality seeds and then maintaining it. You can germinate
seeds and then test it and then as well as get more seeds. Obviously, you're not talking
about 50 seeds being saved. That's one viable. Now the reason I think that's a viable process
because it's been already known and documented for other crops. Protoplast on the other hand
is very difficult in crops. Regenerating plants from protoplast is not easy.
Yeah, no, I agree. But I think that if I were to push where the tech needs to go, I think
that needs better development. Yeah. And the other thing about protoplast is
also when you do long-term cultures with protoplast, you also can introduce variation. So there
is another way of looking at this is taking these shoots or the nodal tips.
And that is to make synthetic seeds or doing cryopreservation, which has again been done
with the plant germ blossoms. So there are multitudes of approach. I mean, I just wanted
to know. But again, as I told you, there needs to be an institutional commitment to do these
things to support. I mean, a private institution cannot do it.
And it comes to my mind and I wouldn't be doing justice if I didn't ask it. So I've
studied economics. And so what always comes to my mind is cost. And so that's kind of
what keeps coming back to mind is you say, oh, test every clone and test them frequently.
And so that seems like that may be a high cost. And then what John's describing with
the tissue culture, if I'm getting that right. So that sounds even more costly. And I think
that may be a problem, right, is a lot of the growers are as far as agriculture goes,
they're small scale farmers, right? These are as far as right there is some really large
agriculture plots out there. So these are kind of small, small scale agriculture. And
so maybe people are just, they're maybe hoping their plants don't have the virus, because
right, it appears that you find out pretty late, the effects if you don't test for it.
So maybe everything looks like it's going along well. And then their flowers, like you
said, they get dusted. And then, you know, they're maybe just trying to salvage it at
that point. So I guess my question is, you know, if somebody's trying to be super cost
effective, you know, is it worth waiting a little while into the vegetative stage to
test because maybe the virus is spread a bit more? Or are you running a risk of spreading
it to your other plants at that point? Like, what are your thoughts for somebody who, I
mean, just imagine this really small scale cultivator who's really trying to be budget
conscious? No, would you still recommend they test and then you know, at what stage I think?
And then every and then another idea is every clone? Or could you potentially, you know,
get away with doing like a random sample of clones? If that's a worthwhile question.
There are several options and obviously depending on the size of the cultivator, the budget,
one strategy that they can do is they can pull one leaf from several plants all together
in one chip. And then we do the analysis for that pool. That is a way to save money. The
only problem is that if one plant or the pool becomes positive, you will have to go back
and analyze individually which plant is the positive one. I mean, in an ideal scenario,
obviously is to test every single plant, but the reality is that no one, even large corporations,
they can do that, right? So frequency is very important. I think my personal recommendation
as a scientist is even for those growers with very limited budget is to test less plants,
but more frequently rather than waiting 10, 12 weeks and at the end decide to analyze
20 plants or 50 plants because the infectation level might be high, the spread, the disease
can be already spread. So it's better to analyze less plants, but at an earlier stage. And
the pooling strategy is neither a bad idea. What do you think, Ajit?
I mean, I agree with you, like, you know, it is not possible for a small scale grower
to do every plant. So in our study, at least we are showing that we can do it as early
as like five, six weeks. This is five, six weeks after cutting from another plant, which
basically if you take three weeks for rooting and you're talking about one or two weeks
before the leaves are emerging that you're actually testing it and you can test that.
So whatever best fits for a small grower is what I think our recommendation is, whether
it's pooling, three dimensional pooling, making rows and columns and randomly random block
design is what the other way, but do frequently check because the, this culprit is going to
be latter. This guy will not, I don't want to be gender biased, but this is not going
to express. And sometimes we are cheated by the virus. And it's so be proactive in preventing
it out of your control. And the only way to do is to know if you by chance have a plant
that you've infected. Because then all other things that the way it's spreading in the
facility is all through your mechanical cutting, your tools, the SAP, you know, it seems like
what I've heard from one of the strongest pathologists is well known, even rubbing this
wire art on the leaf doesn't allow it to infect. So it's mostly coming from the SAP, wherever
you're going or it's spreading through water because roots are growing. So again, Angela's
correct. You know, be proactive and find out what best fits your budget and is your best
solution.
Can I ask, given that you've done very large scale testing, does your database include
any information about the plant samples coming in as like strain names or anything like that
beyond that? The reason I'm asking this question is I'm wondering if you were to look globally
at your large data sets now, are there potential hints in the data for strain names that are
underrepresented and can be somewhat defined therefore as having some degree of resistance?
I realize there's all sorts of confounding issues in bringing that forward. But as a
matter of fact, do you record from your sample submitters the name of the strain?
So let me take this one, Ajit. So we don't have a database for HLV. What we developed
last year is myflora cloud. Okay. And this is a platform where the clients, they get
access to all the data, their data, all the statistics and so on. Obviously we cannot
to share that information publicly because that belongs to the clients and we don't even
know the name of the strain. Some clients, they want for their own record and for their
own statistics, they want to add the name of the cultivars so like that they can check
or they can retrieve the information month by month based on cultivar or year by year
or whatever information they want to add. But there are many other clients that they
just number the plants. So if they send us 500 plants, they number one to 500 and we
don't know that information. But again, this is not a, this is a platform like AT&T or
T-Mobile that you as a user, you get in and then you can check the bill from last month,
how much energy you have spent. But it's not available for the public in general.
What about the concept of incentivizing your submitters to provide more information to
help understand whether there are more resistant strains? We believe there are. We also believe
that there may be epigenetic stress factors that drive towards this and we may be in a
position to determine at a cultivation level if you're running stress cultivation or whatever.
Interestingly anecdotally, we were on a call last week with some Mendo-Sino area growers
and there's the topic came up that is this prevalent in higher mercine strains which
would fit with our models of mercine gross and moto being a stress factor indicator in
cannabis. So I would encourage you, maybe there's you dropped your rates or something
like that if the submitter provides more information and you start to build your data set that
way. So what I would do instead is probably to
create like a consortium including association of growers from different locations, different
states where everybody submit samples and my Florida DNA will take the responsibility
of doing the genetic analysis for free and then what we can do is to write a scientific
article, a scientific manuscript and make it available for the community as a whole.
But we wouldn't be able to use our clients' data and make them public or make a scientific
analysis. So basically we are super happy to do this kind of analysis but good from
scratch where we sit down, we set the foundation of the analysis, what information we want
to get from there, what information the community really needs and my Florida DNA would take
the leadership and would do the genetic analysis again for that consortium free of charge and
then with the condition of making the data public. We are a group of scientists, we are
coming from academic institutions. This is the first time that we decided, we have decided
to put all of our knowledge in a private company so our mind is very academic oriented and
that's why we published this recent publication which is the largest analysis done so far
for HLE because we want to show to the public the technologies and get data from there.
We should then talk further because with the connections that we are developing in Mendocino
Cannabis Alliance as one and the Humboldt County Growers Association which represents
a lot of farms, those would be two key stakeholders if you will and they are certainly all aware
of this so we should talk further about how to move this along.
We are happy to do that.
I thought it was a good idea because the data science meet up after all and so it was kind
of in line with a thought I had that maybe you may ask people if they want to opt in,
that's kind of in line with John's comment in that you've got this sort of gold mine
here and if you just sort of ask people for various data points, sort of who knows what
you may find, right?
How many weeks of vegetation was this plant in, what strain, if they're willing to share
their location, so on and so forth.
A couple of people I think had wanted to ask questions and I apologize to them for not
getting around to it but Candice, Larissa, Blue or anybody, you're welcome to chime in
down with any questions you may have.
So my apologies I didn't get to everybody's questions but I was thinking that the conversation
was going well since we finally got to sort of the data side.
We are happy to come back another time.
I know this is a very hot topic and it takes time so we will be happy to come back next
week or in a few weeks and resume the conversation if we don't have enough time today.
It's okay.
Well I'll reach out to everyone who attended and see if they do have any questions that
they may want to ask you in a future week.
Real quick, welcome to the group Trevor, we're just sort of wrapping up our talks on Hopsley
and Viroid.
If you have any questions, now is the perfect time.
No questions, I just kind of wanted to pop in and just kind of get a feel for the space
and say this is my first time in the space.
Yeah, I think I came a little late, I had a work meeting.
We can kind of move to the third part which is basically okay we've discussed the origins
of Hopsley and Viroid, now we've discussed what it looks like in the industry and now
we've been brainstorming solutions.
So I guess I'll let Dr. Fernandez and Dr. Enand, I'll let you two have the sort of the final
words here, but you know what do you see as a future for cannabis cultivators and you
know how can they you know overcome this obstacle to keep delivering top-notch cannabis flowery
to people.
So what are your thoughts?
Let me jump in Angel if you don't mind.
I think as we were saying our first and foremost recommendation know the plant you have and
when I say that know what the material is and there is where again some of our technologies
will come which means you know we have DNA fingerprinting which can be another conversation
that we can use.
What is the genetics that you have in your grow area, whether the plant is infected or
non-infected, what is the source of the material, that information is very important to both
the grower and as a scientific community for us so that we can look at the progression
of that.
We like this idea of a consortium where the consortium of growers, cultivators and the
nursery can come together and use our sophisticated tools which allow us to be able to understand
what's the issue, what the constraints are and can we recommend some germplasm of genetics
that is superior.
That's a learning that is going to mutually help each other.
I recommend also to work with us on some of the tools that we have developed which is
very high throughput, very reliable, very sensitive and as well as affordable.
You can do that either by sending it to us or we can provide you also possibly on-site
solutions but diagnosis is the best way to prevent the disease so do that proactively.
Now the whole suite of things that opens up with this is when we have more system-extremely
study that goes on with cannabis, we could unravel many things including what John was
saying, maybe there are genotypes which are varieties which are resistance and then looking
for using that for resistance breeding.
That makes me more of understanding how this virus presents itself.
So what our team can do is only do the diagnostic but we need the phenotypic data as well from
the other end.
We have done experiments, we have done huge scale testing with people or growers where
they have had 30-40% of infection down to like 3-5% infection today which basically
says that and historically that tells you that if you have a good practice of managing
this disease you will figure out how to control the disease in your growing.
And there is a lot more scope to understand if there is a host mechanism, is a gene to
gene interaction, is this is the resistant pathway but this will take a lot more dedicated
work and we need public institutions to jump into it.
We as a private organization do not have a grow facility.
All that we can do is, yeah we can support some tissue culture work, we can get rid of
some of the virus, but that's a limitation of what we can do.
Indra, please jump in if you have any other thoughts.
Yes, my main recommendation is obviously encourage growers to test before getting a surprise.
There are, we start seeing many reports stating that the quality of cannabidiol, its concentration
and so on is significantly decreasing.
It's true that we have had many clients that started with levels even above 50% and right
now are around 5%, 6% of the overall infectational level of the facilities and that is thanks
to the testing.
There is not a secret for that.
We understand that the small growers they might have a very limited budget but there
are always solutions by for example by pulling plants, 5, 7 plants in one tube.
That is, you can get information for a very small amount of dollars.
We will be glad to create a consortium and help the industry moving forward with this
problem that is affecting actually the whole community.
Well thank you for your work.
I would just like to end with this in that we always come across these big problems,
these big issues but there is always a little ray of light and the one here is the virus
itself for now it looks like it's remaining pretty constant so that's good.
I have a lot of faith in all of the brilliant innovators and entrepreneurs out there and
that's what's kind of so cool about this is that one person's problem is an opportunity
for an entrepreneur.
So for example my Florida DNA, so we've got cultivators with 50% detection rates and if
you can lower your 50% detection rate to 5% all of a sudden that unmanageable problem
can now be managed and as I was saying in the hemp fields you may never fully eradicate
it right.
There was curly top virus and there was just a small percentage of plants that get affected
by it but overall the hemp field can power through.
So if you can get your cultivation down to maybe a 5% detection rate then hopefully you
can kind of power through that and overcome.
So we'd just like to say as always the future is bright and a big thank you to Dr. Fernandez
and Dr. Anand at my Florida DNA for coming and teaching us a thing or two about hopsley
and viroid and giving us a little bit of hope for the future.
So thank you both.
Sure thank you very much for having us and feel free to contact us anytime with questions
so all the audience can get answered to that.
Thank you from my end too.
Thank you for making the time for us to come and present and I want to thank the community.
What we are doing is because of the community participation and we are here today because
we are able to learn and also at the same time provide solutions.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for your presentation.
Very very interesting.
Good morning.
And thank you all to all the members of the Cannabis Data Science Meetup.
This meetup wouldn't happen without all of you fine folks, all of your brilliant ideas,
your thoughts, your ideas, your questions.
You're the people making this happen at the end of the day.
So thank you.
Thank you for making the meetup happen.
Hopefully we can move the cannabis space forward at least by a molecule or today at least by
a virus.
So slowly but surely I think we're making progress.
Thank you.