One of the reasons why the prohibition of alcohol failed but cannabis is illegal has to do with the DIY-supply. Everyone could brew some alcohol at home. Growing a hemp field is not so easy to do undetected and therefore much easier to enforce. Cheap artificial lighting did have some impact but this yeast (if it works well) could be a real game changer.
Scientists brew cannabis using modified beer yeast
51–60 of 81 posts
Re: Scientists brew cannabis using modified beer yeast
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding of illicit cannabis production is only from films like "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" but it seems to be heat lamps in basements and caravans etc. And the impression the news gives me is that UK Police regularly use heat cameras from helicopters and analysis of electricity bills to find illegal growers. Would this approach allow test-tube illegal cultivation with a much less detectable footpri…
I was thinking this’ll take prison hooch to the next level
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Re: Scientists brew cannabis using modified beer yeast
#53>Scientists brew cannabis using modified beer yeast
There's no word in this title that I don't like!
Re: Scientists brew cannabis using modified beer yeast
#54As someone in this industry, I doubt this will become a reality. The real problem is cost. When you use yeast, you have to supply the energy for the entire system. When you grow a plant, you get free energy from the sun. The cost savings are hard to beat. Nicotine extracts aren't made from yeast either. That should be a big warning flag for the business sides of these cool projects.
>As someone in this industry, I doubt this will become a reality. The real problem is cost. When you use yeast, you have to supply the energy for the entire system. When you grow a plant, you get free energy from the sun. The cost savings are hard to beat.
It's not like beer or cheese has a profit problem...
Re: Scientists brew cannabis using modified beer yeast
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes but at this point sugar is far more industrialized than cannabis. Sugar is ~$.15/lb wholesale (or less).
Which is meaningless unless we know how much sugar is required to produce a given dollar value of usable THC etc molecules. Additionally, cannabis tends to be extraordinarily easy to grow, and THC extraordinarily easy to extract. Cannabis already is grown at industrial scale, all that’s missing is a few large scale certified extraction facilities. Tasmanian Alkaloids, the worlds largest supplier of thebaine, may well…
>Which is meaningless unless we know how much sugar is required to produce a given dollar value of usable THC etc molecules.
Which we can already guesstimate to be not that much.
Re: Scientists brew cannabis using modified beer yeast
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> When you use yeast, you have to supply the energy for the entire system The “entire system” is a vat with yeast in it. For starters, that’s a much more space efficient way of growing something than in plants. Secondly, the energy you provide to the system, in brewing, is just sugar, which is incredibly cheap. In fact, given that this works well, at large scale, for beer brewing (i.e. ethanol production), why do you…
How does yeast get amino acids? How does it get nitrogen for that matter? Doesn’t it need those to grow? Seems like we just give it sugar.
The THC molecule is made from carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, and it seems to be true for all cannabinoids. So if we can extract the cannabinoids but leave the rest of the organic compounds (big "if", I know), one could theoretically recycle the other required nutrients. In which case a steady supply of sugar might indeed be enough for the most part.
Re: Scientists brew cannabis using modified beer yeast
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
> When you use yeast, you have to supply the energy for the entire system The “entire system” is a vat with yeast in it. For starters, that’s a much more space efficient way of growing something than in plants. Secondly, the energy you provide to the system, in brewing, is just sugar, which is incredibly cheap. In fact, given that this works well, at large scale, for beer brewing (i.e. ethanol production), why do you…
How does yeast get amino acids? How does it get nitrogen for that matter? Doesn’t it need those to grow? Seems like we just give it sugar.
minimal media is sugar + some salts that provide Nitrogen and a few other essentials.
Re: Scientists brew cannabis using modified beer yeast
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
You take a gene from a plant, change the codons to whatever yeast uses, and then you put it into the yeast DNA. The hard part is that presumably multiple genes are required to produce a compound, and getting all of them to produce stuff at the right rate is probably difficult as well, since we don't 100% understand how to regulate gene expression.
Thanks! Could you shed some more light on how one actually takes a gene from a plant (in a lab setting I suppose) and put it into yeast?
Step 1 is you hope that someone already identified the gene(s) that do what you want. You look it up in a database and copy-paste the DNA sequence into a word document.
Step 2 you adjust the DNA sequence for the target organism. This might mean using different codons, changing the start of the gene, etc. Usually you also append a few extra genes like GFP or antibiotic resistance genes that make working with your DNA sequence easier.
Step 3 upload your DNA sequence to an online store for DNA synthesis. A few days later you'll get an envelope with a small plastic vial with your synthesized DNA.
Step 4 Now you need to get your DNA into the target organism. I'm not sure how you do that for yeast, but there's probably a well known protocol you can follow. You might also first put your DNA into bacteria to make more of it.
Step 5 now grow your cells, and put them under the microscope, check if they glow green (that's why you put the GFP in there) and perform various other analysis to see if what you did works. It probably didn't, so you go back and change something, and try again.
Re: Scientists brew cannabis using modified beer yeast
#59One of the reasons why the prohibition of alcohol failed but cannabis is illegal has to do with the DIY-supply. Everyone could brew some alcohol at home. Growing a hemp field is not so easy to do undetected and therefore much easier to enforce. Cheap artificial lighting did have some impact but this yeast (if it works well) could be a real game changer.
The prohibition of cannabis also failed. More people than ever are using it, and where it’s illegal it’s run by gangsters, the predictable outcome, exactly the same as prohibition of alcohol.
Actually I think it’s easy to grow weed in your backyard with the sun, just make sure to kill the male plants and you’re good. Whereas say growing tobacco requires much more onerous and is generally done on large farms.
Re: Scientists brew cannabis using modified beer yeast
#60No, scientists brew THC and CBD using modified beer yeast.
Much as how coffee or tea have a lot of interesting things in them that are not caffeine, cannabis has a host of interesting things in it that are neither of those two primary cannabinoids.