Greengro Technologies has launched a new internal company division called GenoBreeding that will direct a Greengro initiative to bring to the market new cannabis varieties through the application of modern plant breeding technologies.
This initiative from Greengro is in keeping with the cannabis industry’s increasing reliance on genetics – heredity and the variation of inherited characteristic in plants – to help growers create better, more powerful and sometimes personalized commercial cannabis strains that share desirable inherited characteristics.
“This initiative includes the use of conventional and modern plant breeding techniques to develop high quality cannabis varieties for medical use,” said Greengro CEO James Haas.
Greengro is working with a team of specialized plant scientists and geneticists to develop cannabis varieties that possess improved levels of key compositional traits (e.g., THC and CBD) by using innovative breeding technologies, according to Haas, who said that Greengro has had its cannabis genetics program in development for a number of years.
Greengro’s GenoBreeding group is focused on developing breeding tools such as molecular markers to enable breeding decisions and processes to achieve top-tier plant performance in a sustainable manner.
“Our collaboration through this initiative with leading scientists enables us to utilize proven crop breeding techniques in the indoor production of cannabis, while at the same time modernizing Greengro’s existing efforts to produce original products for California’s cannabis market,” said Haas, who indicated that the GenoBreeding division will eventually be spun off into its own company.
“We’re developing market leading elite cannabis genetics with innovative breeding solutions,” explained Haas.
Key elements in the breeding program include:
- Development of molecular markers for desired traits and implementation of marker-assisted selection to reduce breeding cycle time.
- Application of genomic systems to enable breeding decisions and processes to achieve sustainable, top-tier plant performance.
The goal of Greengro’s GenoBreeding initiative in using applied genetics in cannabis production is to promote stability and predictability in hybridized strains. Stability refers to minimizing variability and maximizing predictability found in the offspring of parent plant generations.
Genetics is helping growers create better, more powerful and sometimes personalized commercial cannabis strains.
This process involves the cannabis genome (the complete set of genes and genetic material present in the plant), genotype (the plant’s complete heritable genetic identity), and phenotype (the set of a strain’s expressed, observable characteristics resulting from the interaction of its genotype with the environment).
Variability, a consequence of strain genetic instability, refers to the range of different phenotypes that will express when hybridizing two different plant strains. Desirable predictability refers to the expected distribution ratio of a plant’s different phenotypes expressed as a unique strain.