Guelph hopes pot lab cultivates new breed of horticulturalists
University centre dedicated to cannabis production could spark new interest in plant research, dean says
Rene Van Acker is hoping marijuana will prove to be a gateway drug for targeted generations of young people — horticultural students.
In launching the first university lab in Canada dedicated to cannabis production, the dean of the Ontario Agricultural College believes the chance to study pot will entice budding plant scientists to the field in a way that flax or soybeans never could.
“With this topic in particular I think there’s a possibility of attracting all kinds of people to the field that may not have thought about being involved in plant research,” says Van Acker, whose college is part of the University of Guelph.
“They’d be like, ‘Plant research, that sounds not as exciting as I’m looking for, but cannabis research, that catches my attention,’ ” he says.
Christened as the Guelph Centre for Cannabis Research, the incipient lab will likely take two years to get fully up and running and will look at the breeding, production, processing and storage of cannabis, and work with veterinary and human health professionals on campus.
It would include both graduate and undergraduate students.
Van Acker says the coming legalization of recreational cannabis on Oct. 17 will normalize the erstwhile weed and plant it firmly within the field of everyday Canadian crops.
“We view this as just an expansion of the agriculture and food sector,” he says. “And so we view it very positively in that respect. And our involvement has been with an industry that is very serious (and) wants to employ science.”
Until recently, however, clandestine growers have had to rely on homespun techniques in trying to optimize the growth of their plants and to tailor the hundreds of constituent psychoactive, taste or medicinal compounds they can yield.
And while the new lab must wait as Health Canada research licensing regulations take shape — no timetable has been set — scientists attached to it have already produced the first three North American studies on marijuana production to ev- er be published in peer-reviewed journals.
Like beekeepers or potato farmers, recreational pot growers — and the medicinal producers who preceded them — will be looking for solid, reproducible research to inform their husbandry, Van Acker says.
“These are commercial enterprises so there’s a lot at stake so they’re looking for real ... scientific information,” he says. “And they’re not only interested in things like yield, but just like every other agricultural industry they are also interested in delivering quality to the customer with consistency.”
And no, college scientists will not be testing the quality of their research by sparking it up, Van Acker says.
Rather, he says, the plants can be broken down into their chemical components and judged by the concentration of key ingredients.
“There are all sorts of constituent elements ... that are responsible for the effect and the industry is interested in standardizing so they can produce consistency and we will be part of that,” Van Acker says. “And the consistency is a function not only of the genetics, but it’s a function in fact of the interaction between the genetics and the environments the plants are grown in.”
Experimenting with the growing environments of their research plants will be a key occupation of Guelph’s herb scientists as their $10 million, twostorey lab and greenhouse take shape.
Despite all the high tech hydroponics associated with mar- ijuana operations, the plant is not all that hard to grow, says Guelph horticulturalist Youbin Zheng, a co-author of the groundbreaking cannabis production papers.
“After all, in the wild it was a weed and that’s why it’s called weed,” says Zheng, who has conducted his research with licensed medicinal growers at their facilities until now.
What’s hard is getting the maximum amount of plant in minimal growth times and with the desired and consistent potency levels for medicinal effectiveness or recreational highs.
“In the past when people said marijuana (or) cannabis, it’s just one thing came to mind — (the buzz-inducing) THC,” Zheng says, referring to tetrahydrocannabinol.
“But now that’s not the case because now there are over 200 ... varieties of cannabis and each one has a different chemical profile,” he says adding there has been a profusion of new strains in recent years.
Those chemical profiles centre mainly around two classes of compounds — cannabinoids and terpenes — that have different effects on users.
“The cannabinoids part — and you’ve got so many different cannabinoids — include THC which makes people high and CBD (cannabidiol, which) is more medicinal,” Zheng says.
The terpenes influence the taste and aroma of the product and may also play roles in such secondary recreational or medicinal effects as relaxation or focus, he says.
The concentrations and ratios of these so-called second metabolite compounds in a plant are influenced first and foremost by its genetics, and breeding strategies will play a large role in the centre’s research, Zheng says.
But these genetic levels can be significantly altered by such things as watering strategies, fertilizer usage and even the spectral arrays of light to which the plants are exposed.
“It is classic nature and nurture,” Zheng says.
The first problem to be tackled on the nurturing side, he says, is to find ways to scale production up from the small, clandestine operations of prohibition times to the industrialsized cannabis factories that will supply the legal trade.
“When you grow big scale in a controlled environment there are loads of things we don’t really know how to (do), to be most efficient,” Zheng says.
What, for example, is the best way to prepare cannabis cuttings for optimal propagation?
Zheng says common practice among furtive and medicinal growers was to prune the cuttings back before planting.
“But our research shows that you don’t need to do that, that the leafy plants do better,” he says.
Zheng and his colleagues have also been playing with different fertilizers, soil sub-straits and light settings to try to maximize plant growth once those cuttings take.
Light manipulation also plays a role in causing the plants to enter their flowering stage, during which most of the second metabolite production occurs.
And when the plants are under environmental stress during flowering, Zheng says, they produce more of these desired chemicals.
“So we are looking at, can we hold water a little bit to give them a signal that says ‘oh, I’m under stress so I’m going to produce more,” he says of one experiment.
Zheng says the new centre will also interact with the school’s veterinary college to see if different cannabis products can be used to treat animal ailments.
Guelph also has human health faculties that can have input into the new lab.
“The centre is supposed to get all of these people, from plant people, to animal people to human health people ... to work together,” he says.
Van Acker says the school is raising funds for the dedicated, onsite facility that will likely be built over the next two years.
“But that does not prevent us from doing all kinds of leading work in the meantime ... with existing producers,” he says. “And the agriculture and food field is one that needs all kinds of bright young people ... so we’re excited by all of the profile that this topic gets.”