Legal THC?
Can a legal plant that produces THC be engineered? Surely there would be a market for a legal and common plant to produce THC.coton737,
Waverly Hall, Georgia
It might seem that the DNA responsible for THC production is easy enough to transfer from cannabis to other organisms. There are a lot of incentives to transfer the DNA to another organism. Perhaps one use would be to isolate the specific genes responsible for THC analogs used for treating disease. Then they could be "manufactured" in another organism. Another would be to create standardized brands of marijuana.
I think people are willing to accept transgenic drugs, but they will tend to shy away from herbs or recreational drugs if they realize that they are genetically modified. Without labeling, which is not now required by law, who's to know?
One of the main candidates for a legal plant would be tobacco. Tobacco's genetics is widely mapped and it is used as an experimental model all the time. Imagine a tobacco leaf without nicotine. The leaf looks like it is littered with crystal dust. It shines brilliant in the sun. It is peak summer and the glands will be ripe by mid-August. People don't smoke the vegetative matter any more, but do vaporize glands from the different varieties. Each is designed for its mood altering characteristics. That would be a strange world. Back to reality.
It is more likely that the code would be transferred to yeast. Their DNA is well deciphered and they have been used and manipulated by humans for thousands of years. Yeast don't need light, just water, sugar, nutrients and a suitable temperature and they'd be ready to produce THC shortly after they enter the wort (the sterilized brew). The crop would be ready in five days. Home brewers would use the THC they refine from the brew in cooking and vaporizers.
However, if the current crop of politicians or their ideological progeny are in power when this happens, they would surely outlaw the transgenic THC carrier, too. Let's just focus on legalizing the real herb.
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genetic engineering of THC biosynthesis
as nice as it would be to simply take a gene from C. sativa, plug that into tobacco, and express the hell out of THC, it is simply not that simple (otherwise it would have been done long ago). THC is not a protein, and thus not encoded by DNA. THC is formed from a series of enzymatic and non-enzymatic reactions in planta, so any genetic engineering project must be able to reconstruct the entire architecture of THC biosynthesis in the new system. First we must have an extremely thorough understanding of THC biosynthesis, and then take the genes for enzymes involved, and get them to express in the right tissue at the right time and in the right amount in tobacco or some other system. All of this can be VERY problematic. So don't hold your breath! Check out [Monika Fellermeier and Meinhart H. Zenk, "Prenylation of olivetolate by a hemp transferase yields cannabigerolic acid, the precursor of tetrahydrocannabinol." 1998] for some details.
not to mention political
not to mention political opposition to all of this...
Enzymatic THC Patent Published - Zenk References
You might be interested in the referenced patent which has among its many references two by M. H. Zenk, numbers 12 & 13, at GREENSTONEPATENT.com So far the best feedback we received was "Why didn't I think of that?" Eight years in the doing, two so-called inventors laughing their way to the USPTO. See COMPOSITIONS AND METHODS RELATING TO EXTENSIBLE TRANSGENIC VECTOR
ASSEMBLER, PESTILENCE RIDDER, PLUS CANNABINOID PRODUCER. Itsa pretty good read. Co-Inventor VVC
it is that simple, and they should have done it a long time ago
yeah jon - lot of folks thought it would or should be difficult... it's not, and the Fellermeier link is from a couple that are trying to remove THC from cannabis.... they've got a slightly different slant on the stuff one might say.
"Crystallization of ?1-tetrahydrocannabinolic acid (THCA) synthase from Cannabis sativa" by Shoyama et al is another interesting article with clever methods - Available at http://ncbi.nih.gov along with many other great reviews
Enzymatic THC Patent Published
The COMPOSITIONS AND METHODS RELATING TO EXTENSIBLE TRANSGENIC VECTOR ASSEMBLER, PESTILENCE RIDDER, PLUS CANNABINOID PRODUCER patent was published by the United States Patent Office on February 12, 2009. The process has been classified a detergent by the USPTO and is under the purview of the Environmental Protection Agency, not the Federal Drug Administration and there lies the difference. The process is designed to produce an industrial-strength, pennies-on-the-$, bio-degradable mean green killing machine. Thanx for the interest. Co-Inventor VVC
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