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: 2) by takyon on Friday March 01 2019, @08:53PM
If you get this into the hands of hobbyists, they will figure out if it is easier to grow plants and extract hash oil, or grow the special yeast, refine the THC and infuse it into oil. They'll also figure out how to replace expensive industrial equipment with cheaper stuff that can be obtained at the hardware store.
All that's needed is a sample of the yeast, so that it can be reproduced, dried, and widely distributed from one enthusiast to another, or the full genome sequence, which could be used at some point in the future to create the organism from scratch. Probably the former will leak out before the latter could actually be used in that way, but it would still be a good thing to have.
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