SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
University of California, Berkeley, synthetic biologists have engineered brewer's yeast to produce marijuana's main ingredients -- mind-altering THC and non-psychoactive CBD -- as well as novel cannabinoids not found in the plant itself.
Feeding only on sugar, the yeast are an easy and cheap way to produce pure cannabinoids that today are costly to extract from the buds of the marijuana plant, Cannabis sativa.
"For the consumer, the benefits are high-quality, low-cost CBD and THC: you get exactly what you want from yeast," said Jay Keasling, a UC Berkeley professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and of bioengineering and a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "It is a safer, more environmentally friendly way to produce cannabinoids."
Cannabis and its extracts, including the high-inducing THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, are now legal in 10 states and the District of Columbia, and recreational marijuana -- smoked, vaped or consumed as edibles -- is a multibillion-dollar business nationwide. Medications containing THC have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration to reduce nausea after chemotherapy and to improve appetite in AIDS patients.
CBD, or cannabidiol, is used increasingly in cosmetics -- so-called cosmeceuticals -- and has been approved as a treatment for childhood epileptic seizures. It is being investigated as a therapy for numerous conditions, including anxiety, Parkinson's disease and chronic pain.
[...] Cannabinoids join many other chemicals and drugs now being produced in yeast, including human growth hormone, insulin, blood clotting factors and recently, but not yet on the market, morphine and other opiates.
Complete biosynthesis of cannabinoids and their unnatural analogues in yeast (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-0978-9)
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 4, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday February 28 2019, @11:42PM (14 children)
Pot plants breathe CO2 in. Yeast breathes CO2 out. Well not really breathes but it does produce a whole lot of it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday March 01 2019, @12:14AM (2 children)
I can't tell you about the environmental footprint or purity of product. Better quality-control is always a good thing, but I wonder if we will hit the "quality-control" being the point of factory-farmed in favor of free-range weed just as we did hogs, cows, and chickens for eatin'!
Shit, factory-farmed weed nowadays is (good, but) packed with so much nitrogen and other McVeigh-approved explosives you wonder if it's the laughing gas you're sucking, rather than the cannibinoids, that's making All-Female-Ghostbusters funny to watch after smoking all that pot.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 01 2019, @01:06AM (1 child)
Cannabis did not improve that film for me.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 01 2019, @04:14AM
No, you're gonna need some acid
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Friday March 01 2019, @12:37AM (10 children)
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Informative) by Snotnose on Friday March 01 2019, @01:51AM (3 children)
Um, it's called weed for a reason. It grows anywhere you let it. Like your back yard, greenhouse, closet with grow lights (a friend actually did this in the 70s).
I've grown it myself, my brother in law sells his grow. I don't smoke it myself (I'm an alcoholic, weed doesn't do much for me unfortunately), but whatevs.
My ducks are not in a row. I don't know where some of them are, and I'm pretty sure one of them is a turkey.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 01 2019, @02:26AM
mediocre weed is easy to grow but great weed required a lot of attention to avoid pest also to reach a THC level over 20% you need to stress the plant by splitting the stalk in two and reattach them....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 01 2019, @02:55AM
It's probably got a lot to do with the restricions on growing (like it has to be indoors, or not visible and fenced in with no access etc.), that are making high-volume growing less practical. If you could just plant 10000 acres, there would be no point doing all that expensive stuff to maximizing the quality, as the sheer volume of product would suffice.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday March 01 2019, @08:21PM
It grows anywhere you let it. Like your back yard, greenhouse, closet with grow lights (a friend actually did this in the 70s).
Unfortunately (in CO at least) it's illegal to grow it outside. So your backyard is probably out. A sturdy greenhouse that you can lock would probably work, though.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Friday March 01 2019, @03:49AM (5 children)
It's funny how as soon as it became clear that the old excuses wouldn't fly anymore, suddenly the smell of a joint became the most potent bad smell known to science, and when vaping it took over, suddenly growing a single plant started consuming the entire energy output of the sun for a year and creating more environmental devastation than the sum of all human activity dating back to Homo Erectus.
I'm pretty sure when that doesn't work out, we'll 'discover' that even seeing a picture of a pot plant triggers male pattern baldness for the next 8 generations AND a nasty hangnail.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday March 01 2019, @04:05AM (3 children)
If you don't like it, find or produce the analysis that shows that it isn't so environmentally damaging (or significantly beyond the damage caused or resources used by other agricultural products).
I think it's very plausible that yeast spitting out these compounds could be more efficient, and crucially, cheaper. And we can imagine other drugs being far cheaper and easier to produce using yeast, e.g. LSD. Maybe these yeast-based processes won't be used to produce the full range of cannabinoids you would expect in the plant, causing a degraded or different experience when used. But as I already wrote, the existence of this technique should not be used as an excuse to keep the plant banned. Just as we want to legalize cannabis even when you have overpriced Marinol and other cannabis-derived pharmaceutical products on the market.
If you want just THC or some other molecule, using yeast to produce it seems like it would have many advantages.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by sjames on Friday March 01 2019, @04:40AM (1 child)
I'm pretty sure I don't need evidence that unphysical and uneconomic things aren't happening. As for the electricity use, that is an artifact of prohibition itself and will go away along with that prohibition. You'll notice nobody grows corn or soy in their basement.
Notably, according to fool.com, wholesale prices were around $1500/lb and falling in 2018 which makes the claim that the electricity cost more than $1000 a bit questionable as an economic proposition.
yeast based production will quite possibly cost less but you can bet that until the patents die of old age the end product won't.
I don't claim that pot cultivation causes no damage, but the disproportionate figures are very likely just the latest wave of reefer madness.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 01 2019, @01:59PM
You stay the hell out of my basement! The world isn't ready for the UnderCorn.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 01 2019, @12:22PM
Environmentally damaging != currently being grown in a manner that is environmentally damaging. It's not the pot that's the issue, it's the growers.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday March 01 2019, @08:24PM
I'd give up my hair before my weed!