A Vancouver Island cannabis nursery has teamed up with BC’s Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU) to develop affordable methods for growers to more accurately identify what cannabis cultivars they are growing. 

Life Cycle Botanics, a cannabis nursery located just north of Nanaimo, BC, has been partnering with researchers at KPU in 2024 to develop a barcoding project for cannabis that creates a library of known cultivars. 

The process creates a database of Short Sequence Repeats, or SSRs, which are repeating sequences of DNA that are used as molecular markers in genetics. By working with a cannabis nursery with a large array of cannabis cultivars to draw from, KPU’s researchers could utilize their knowledge and experience with documenting these SSRs, creating the foundation for an expanding library of known cultivars.

The benefit for growers, explains Andrew Hand, head of science at Life Cycle Botanics, is that this can both help them better identify cultivars they have in-house, as well as serve as IP protection by creating a way to accurately identify any of their exclusive cultivars being used by other cultivators without permission. The project with KPU is nearing completion, at which point they hope to release it to other growers. 

It’s a well-known technology, he explains, and is an easy and cost-effective way to identify one plant phenotype, in this case cannabis, from another.

“For the most part, even experts have a hard time splitting hairs between strains when they’re in their vegetative state. So this is a way to be able to determine, definitely, without needing to flower a plant, ‘yes, this phenotype is what we think it is’”.

“[KPU] have been great to work with, and have done a great job helping us document this entire process,” Hand tells StratCann. “We’re right on schedule where we have these regions identified and they’re being validated and we’re almost ready to go so we can utilize this technology internally, or to provide for other growers.” 

In instances where a plant may have been mislabelled, or even inaccurately identified in the first place, or simply lost in the crowd, such cost-effective technology, continues Hand, can help quickly and easily get a mother room back into order. Given the amount of genetic drift in some cannabis cultivars, as well as how easy such misidentification can be, this can lead to problems for breeders and growers alike who might otherwise need to grow a plant out for several weeks or months to know its true genetic expression. This testing will save that time and effort. 

This can also help more rapidly identify any new cultivars, he notes.

“We’ve developed a barcode database for all of our strains [at Life cycle]. We know what the barcode should physically look like when you do this test. So if we have a bunch of unknown plants, we would test against our known catalogue of barcodes. And if it doesn’t line up, then we know we have a new genotype.”

In addition, as more breeders and nurseries are selling their unique cultivars to commercial growers, often under a limited or exclusive contract, such testing can help protect that IP, he adds. 

Dr. Paul Adams, the Director of the KPU Applied Genomics Centre, says the partnership is like many others his department has with different branches of agriculture. By partnering with LCB, his team has access to a greater cannabis genetic bank, while KPU offers the equipment and expertise, as well as interpretation of the data they collect. 

“Our entire focus is using genomic, genetic tools to support agriculture. We have a bunch of…high tech equipment and a bunch of people who know how to use that technology and we use it to support agriculture in whatever way they need.”

Another valuable application of the technology, he adds, is for breeding, by selecting for desirable traits or selecting out undesirable traits. 

“There’s actually quite a bit you can do in terms of cultivar development and breeding strategies,” says Adams.More about KPU’s program is available here.

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