The Genetic Structure of Marijuana and Hemp

Here is a great paper our of Canada about the genetics of Cannabis. They obviously need many more samples, but this is a great start. They did include some widely available commercial drug varieties.

Check it out:

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0133292


I am excited and curious to see how these new data and those to come will square with the ancestry proposed in Clarke and Merlin's book Cannabis: Evolution and Ethnobotany. The results seem opposed right now, as the PLOS study found C. indica was more closely related to hemp than samples identified as C. sativa. Whereas Clarke and Merlin propose European hemp is C. sativa, and nearly all non-European Cannabis is C. indica.

Looks to me like they accept common usage as a starting point for their taxonomy, where NLD = sativa. From there, they essentially observe the same thing, that "sativa" and "indica" aren't very genetically distinct as commonly used, but there's a clear distinction between drug strains and hemp. That would lend weight to the proposition that the two names ought to be used to distinguish two genetically distinct populations, and likely that would put hemp in either sativa or ruderalis, and the drug strains in indica.