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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)
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(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.