DNA sequence of cannabis online thanks to Dutch lab

Run by American Kevin McKernan, with a laboratory in Amsterdam, the Mecca of cannabis, the company Medicinal Genomics has deciphered the genetic identity of cannabis, DNA sequence and all.

Apparently, Cannabis sativa“has 84 other compounds that could fight pain or possibly even shrink tumors. But anti-marijuana laws make it difficult for scientists to breed and study the plant in most countries. That’s one reason he decided to publish his data for free on Amazon’s EC2, a public data cloud.”

The idea is of course to produce all kinds of ‘good’ products without the nasty side effects of getting high. And then you can’t grow plants just anywhere to conduct experiments in many countries, and so the Netherlands is quite convenient sometimes.

(Links: gizmodo.com, npr.org, Photo by Eric Caballero, some rights reserved)

This entry was posted on Friday, August 19th, 2011 at 9:07 pm and is filed under Nature, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Tags: Amsterdam, drugs, marijuana