{"id":2025,"date":"2020-02-02T07:15:02","date_gmt":"2020-02-02T07:15:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nrgene.com\/?p=2025"},"modified":"2023-03-30T13:58:12","modified_gmt":"2023-03-30T13:58:12","slug":"making-cannabis-history-in-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nrgene.com\/making-cannabis-history-in-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"MAKING CANNABIS HISTORY IN 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"
2020 is expected to be an exceptional year for the expansion of work done in Cannabis genomics. At the annual PAG meeting held this January in San Diego, academic experts and industry leaders met to share insights on the work they\u2019ve done with this plant. While there were several scientific presentations made during the conference, the highlight of the event came the last day of the conference when an international group of industry and academic volunteers came together to form the International Cannabis Research Consortium (ICRC).<\/p>\n
The ICRC is tasked with creating a unified approach to curating and documenting work done in Cannabis Genomics. As Cannabis sativa includes both hemp and marijuana types, leaders such as Larry Smart from Cornell and Graham King from Southern Cross University as well as industry representatives from the US, Canada, Europe and Israel were all able to contribute to the discussion.<\/p>\n
The first order of business was to agree on a \u2018reference genome\u2019 and chromosome id\u2019s for Cannabis. This was a bit of a challenge as there are several reference genome assemblies already available in the public space to be considered for use as the de facto reference. Consensus from the committee was that currently, the CBDRX CS10 assembly was the best quality assembly with a supporting transcript dataset and it was proposed that this should be declared the Cannabis reference for future work. However, even with choosing a reference, there remains the challenge of reconciling datasets across all the genomes already out in the public domain. This is because the chromosome assignments for each assembly can vary widely.<\/p>\n
As NRGene has recently generated it\u2019s own Cannabis Genomic Database (CannaGene), we\u2019ve already done the analysis on the chromosomal mapping across 4 of the reference genomes in the public space (see the table below). We\u2019re providing this to the ICRC as well as information on the chromosome lengths and N-content for the 4 genomes we\u2019ve looked at. This will be used by the consortium to check chromosome order and length.<\/p>\n