The variety in the hundreds of Emerald entries has set the scientists’ heads spinning, and not in a good way. Plant genomes are tricky to sequence, and cannabis DNA is particularly challenging. Gaudino just needed more data to string them together. Still, they were longer than anyone else had, easier to reassemble. It wasn’t a genome yet: 583 million base pairs shattered into 18,000 puzzle pieces. Then Gaudino went to a Berkeley dispensary, bought a citrusy-smelling Kush strain called Pineapple Bubba, and spent $20,000 on reagents and data-crunching to sequence it. Unlike the much cheaper Illumina sequencers, the PacBio reads fragments of DNA as long as 53,000 base pairs. It’s a giant white box sitting next to the freezer full of frozen buds, adorned with 8-inch-tall Cheech and Chong dolls that Gaudino got when he was a kid. “And I went long.” In 2014, Steep Hill spent $1.1 million on a PacBio RS II sequencer, one of fewer than 200 in the country.
“I’m not a gambling man, but this was one of the times that I gambled,” he says. In the end, those first attempts to sequence the cannabis genome yielded hundreds of thousands of tiny fragments, so many that nobody could stitch them together. If the crossbred genome were a jigsaw puzzle, most of the picture would be blue sky. They’ve been crossbreeding for so long to pump up pot’s psychoactivity that modern strains can have as many as 11 copies of the gene that synthesizes THC. There’s also ocimene, nerolidol, pinene-the interaction of all these chemicals creates whatever distinction exists between ’78 LA OG Affie and, say, Green Crack.Ĭannabis breeders have made the problems even worse. Beta-caryophyllene has the scent of pepper. Myrcene, for example, smells like hops and mango (and some fans claim it increases the potency of THC). Those are the result of the interactions of hundreds of molecules-cannabinoids, yes, but also another class called terpenoids. Purple Kush and Sour Diesel have different characters, different smells and tastes and feels. But any remotely dedicated smoker will tell you that a strain is more than its potency. Steep Hill quantifies the numbers you see on labels in dispensaries: how much tetrahydrocannabinol (THC, the molecule that gets you high) and cannabidiol (CBD, the component of weed thought to alleviate seizures) are in a given strain of pot. As more and more states (23 so far) are finding legal ways for people to consume cannabis, Steep Hill and labs like it are becoming more important.
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