R
rick shaw
Medical Genomics,a private company headquartered in Marblehead,Mass.and The Netherlands,announced today that it sequenced the entire genomes of Cannabis Sativa and Cannabis Indica,representing two strains of the therapeutic plant.
The genome assemblies,comprising over 131 billion bases of sequence,are the largest known gene collection of the cannabis genomes and will be made publically available to the scientic community this Fall.
The genome data is expected to aid in the advancement of research on the therapeutic benefits of the cannabis plant for a wide range of health conditions,including cancer and inflamatory diseases.
"Despite compelling evidence of the therapeutic benifits of cannabis,very little genomics research has been preformed in this area" said Kevin McKernon,founder and head of scientific operations of Medical Genomics. "With the goal to sequence multiple varieties,we initially took the approach of using short-read next generation sequencing technology on the Cannabis Sativa strain".
"We quickly realized that this method was not going to provide a clear picture of the genome required to tease out the important biological pathways".
"The realization caused somewhat of a paradigm shift in the way we approached the project. At this point we moved to triple back crossed cultivars and longer read technology"
They were surprised in part by the finding that genomic variation between cannabis strains is over 1%,a figure 10 times the variation of human genomes.
The genome assemblies,comprising over 131 billion bases of sequence,are the largest known gene collection of the cannabis genomes and will be made publically available to the scientic community this Fall.
The genome data is expected to aid in the advancement of research on the therapeutic benefits of the cannabis plant for a wide range of health conditions,including cancer and inflamatory diseases.
"Despite compelling evidence of the therapeutic benifits of cannabis,very little genomics research has been preformed in this area" said Kevin McKernon,founder and head of scientific operations of Medical Genomics. "With the goal to sequence multiple varieties,we initially took the approach of using short-read next generation sequencing technology on the Cannabis Sativa strain".
"We quickly realized that this method was not going to provide a clear picture of the genome required to tease out the important biological pathways".
"The realization caused somewhat of a paradigm shift in the way we approached the project. At this point we moved to triple back crossed cultivars and longer read technology"
They were surprised in part by the finding that genomic variation between cannabis strains is over 1%,a figure 10 times the variation of human genomes.
