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Tag: Growing Cannabis

  • Can Cannabis Strains Be Patented?

    Can Cannabis Strains Be Patented?

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    Emily Mullins

    Posted by Emily Mullins on 04/02/2024 in Cannabis Laws

    Can Cannabis Strains Be Patented?Can Cannabis Strains Be Patented?

    Cannabis “strains” are distinct genetic varieties of the cannabis sativa plant that are bred for certain desirable characteristics such as aroma, terpene profile, potency, or flavor. Although it seems strange to patent a breathing, developing live organism, plants have been granted patents in the United States since the 1930s, with the very first plant patent being issued to Henry Bosenberg for a special breed of rose in 1931.

    For breeders and cultivators, patenting a cannabis strain can provide advantages by granting exclusive rights to unique genetic compositions and desirable traits inherent in a particular plant. With patent protection, a breeder can benefit from compensation for their investment of time, resources, and expertise into developing novel cannabis varieties with enhanced properties. 

    How are Strains Created?

    Cannabis breeders combine traditional horticultural techniques with modern scientific knowledge of genetics.

    Typically, a breeder will select parent plants, a male and a female plant, that exhibit desired traits, such as high potency, unique flavors, or specific medicinal properties. Then, these ideal parent plants are cross-pollinated to create diverse offspring with traits combined from both parents in a process called selective breeding. Pollen is extracted from a male plant and then gently deposited onto the flowers of the female plant, and seeds develop within six weeks.

    Through successive generations of careful selection, breeders isolate and stabilize desired traits while eliminating undesirable ones over time. Ultimately, the aim is to develop plants that offer consumers unique, appealing characteristics. 

    Patenting Plants

    A plant patent is an intellectual property right granted to protect an inventor’s discovery or cultivation of a new variety of plants. The Plant Patent Act states that:

    “Whoever invents or discovers and asexually reproduces any distinct and new variety of plant, including cultivated sports, mutants, hybrids, and newly found seedlings, other than a tuber propagated plant or a plant found in an uncultivated state, may obtain a patent therefor…”

    Plants discovered in nature cannot be patented, because they occur spontaneously through biological processes and were not invented. Someone is said to have “invented” a plant and is eligible for a plant patent if the person created a novel and unique variety of a plant that they are able to reproduce asexually, such as by grafting.

    Additionally, the plant eligible for a plant patent must have been altered by the inventor to the extent that the resulting organism is considered non-naturally occurring. Obtaining a plant patent ultimately ensures that an inventor, who invested labor and skill into producing a novel plant product, has protection from other growers cloning the plant or selling the plant and any of its parts.

    Plants can also be designated as intellectual property with a utility patent, which provides more comprehensive protection. A plant patent is limited to protecting a single plant and its direct descendants, so the patent does not cover plants grown from the seeds of the patented mother plant, just clones of the mother plant and its parts.

    On the other hand, a utility patent gives its owner the right to prevent any person in the US from making, using, selling, or importing the plant itself as well as its clones, tissues, or even individual cells, regardless of whether the plant is sexually or asexually produced. In order to obtain this type of patent, the cannabis plant must not be naturally occurring, and it must demonstrate usefulness and novelty, and its innovation must be non-obvious. 

    Patenting a Cannabis Strain

    Although it is federally illegal in the United States to possess, distribute, or cultivate cannabis plants (that do not meet the standards for classification as “hemp”), the US still grants patent protection for illegal substances just as they do for legal inventions. As long as an inventor can prove that their cannabis plant is novel, distinct, and non-natural, the plant is eligible for a US patent, and as of 2021, 12 patents for cannabis plant varieties have been issued.

    Thus, under plant patents and utility patents, you can patent strains of cannabis. To apply for a patent, the inventor must prove that they discovered or created a strain that is not naturally occurring and is different from other existing plants by at least one distinguishing characteristic which is not caused by growing conditions (like fertilizers, etc.). Furthermore, the inventor must prove that the invention was not obvious to somebody with ordinary skills. These patents last around 20 years. 

    A patent application for either a plant or utility patent to protect your cannabis strain must contain information such as:

    • What plants/breeds were crossed,
    • Description of plant phenotype, botanical features, and properties that distinguish the plant from other known plants,
    • If the plant was propagated asexually, technical details about the manner and placement of propagation,
    • Pictures of the plant, 
    • A certificate of analysis (depending on the state) or some other scientific description of how reported cannabinoid levels were ascertained. 

    The Future of Cannabis Patents

    While intellectual property rights offer incentives for innovation and investment in the development of novel cannabis plants, these legal protections also raise concerns about accessibility to medicinal cannabis and potential monopolization by corporate entities.

    With substantial financial resources, extensive legal teams, and established market networks, large corporations possess a distinct advantage in navigating the complexities of the patenting process. Patents cost money, and small-scale growers can be effectively out-competed by enterprises in possession of more resources to conduct massive breeding operations and ultimately claim more numerous and more optimized strains for themselves.

    Large corporations can leverage their resources to invest in sophisticated cultivation facilities to conduct extensive research and accelerate the creation of unique strains with desirable traits. Moreover, wealthier companies have greater access to distribution channels, which enables them to scale up production and reach a wider consumer base, thus profiting more from their creations than small-scale growers.

    Despite the risk of monopolization in the industry, patenting cannabis plants is a relatively new phenomenon, and we are living through a future that holds promise for exciting discoveries, unforeseen opportunities, and novel experiences of the effects offered by the cannabis plant.

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  • How to Create Your Own Strain

    How to Create Your Own Strain

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    Emily Mullins

    Posted by Emily Mullins on 04/04/2024 in Growing

    How to Create Your Own StrainHow to Create Your Own Strain

    There are myriad reasons why people decide to create their own strains of cannabis. A cannabis strain is a specific variety of cannabis sativa plant that consistently reproduces the same characteristic traits, like aromas, flavors, and medicinal effects. Some people breed new cannabis plants as a business venture, some want to customize their cannabis experience, and others are looking to enjoy the botanical pursuit of crafting novel plant varieties.

    If you are inexperienced in the wide world of cannabis plant care, or plant care in general, the idea of creating your own unique strain may sound ludicrously daunting. True, the breeding process does require a level of patience, labor, and skill, but with enough dedication and guidance, you can take on the challenge of breeding your very own cannabis strain. 

    Breeding Cannabis Plants

    Typically, breeders opt to grow new strains in a breeding chamber, but this process can also occur outdoors if the plants are kept close together. To create a growing chamber, you can use whatever equipment or decoration your budget allows, but all you basically need is a simple enclosed space with plastic sheeting to control the environment and spread of pollen during the process. The chamber typically houses one male plant among multiple female plants, since it only takes one male to pollinate many female plants in the breeding chamber – one male can pollinate about 20 females. 

    1. Choosing your strains

    There are over 700 strains of cannabis. Each strain has its own characteristic flavors, aromas, and medicinal properties. When selecting plants to cross for your exclusive cannabis strain, the right strains to choose will depend on your motivation for breeding a strain. You might want to experiment with a special terpene profile, or perhaps there is a potency level you prefer. Choose a couple of strains you enjoy or do some research into what strains are known to produce the effects you desire. 

    1. Determining plant sexes

    Cannabis plants come in male and female varieties, and you will need to distinguish the plants before setting them up in the pollinating chamber. Female cannabis plants produce flowers that contain all the desirable compounds used in cannabis products. Therefore, when breeding your plants in general, look more closely at the females for the floral traits you desire, because you cannot know what genetics the male plant will contribute to flowering from examining them. 

    Once the plants reach the flowering stage at around three weeks, you should be able to tell them apart. Males have small, closed, round “buds” that are actually pollen sacs, whereas female flowers take on more of an open, fuzzy look. 

    1. Gathering pollen

    In the first weeks of the plant’s flowering stage, the male plant will form pollen sacs. The pollen is released from these sacs into the air and lands on the female plants’ flowers to accomplish pollination. This is why it is helpful to utilize an enclosed breeding chamber to contain the spread or loss of cannabis pollen and to prevent the invasion of outside pollen that might interfere with your project. 

    Alternatively, you could also collect the male plant’s pollen by gathering it yourself. Using a paper sheet or plastic container, collect pollen by gently shaking a branch with pollen sacs over the sheet or container, allowing the pollen to fall onto the surface. You can also shake pollen from the male plant directly onto the females.

    1. Pollinating

    If you opted to manually gather pollen to pollinate the plants yourself, the next step is to pollinate the female plants with the male’s pollen. The best time to pollinate female cannabis plants is around two or three weeks into the flowering stage. Just gently blow the pollen you collected from the male plant to distribute it over the female plants. It is also good practice to deactivate leftover pollen three hours following pollination. You will simply need to spray the newly fertilized female plants with some water. 

    Allow your cannabis plants to continue their progress through the flowering period. As the females continue to grow, they produce both seeds and buds. Seeds typically mature after two to six weeks. 

    1. Harvesting the seeds

    Once the seeds are fully mature, they are harvested and dried. Drying the seeds is a necessary step for germination to occur when you grow your next generation of plants. The seeds can dry in the flowers, which are typically harvested 3 to 4 weeks prior to the harvest of seeds, meaning it can take about a month after you finally have seeds before the seeds can be germinated.

    The resulting seeds will contain the genetics of both male and female plants and can be grown on their own as new hybrid plants. Each seed is genetically unique and carries different combinations of traits from each of the parent strains, like the way human siblings take on various different and similar traits from their parents. 

    1. Backcrossing and Stabilization

    Breeding two plants together doesn’t seem super complicated, but you will need to do more than just obtain hybridized seeds to develop a stable new strain. New seeds are not the same as new strains because without stabilization, the plants’ characteristics will be lost in later generations, and your plants will not produce consistent results. This means breeding your own cannabis strain can likely take years.

    Depending on the stability (homozygosity) of your parent plants, your seeds will come with varying levels of genetic heterozygosity. In order to stabilize a cannabis cultivar such that it will replicate the same traits predictably, breeders next work on breeding the strain to be homozygous. Homozygosity ensures that a plant will produce the same seeds with the same genetic features repeatedly, so consumers are able to receive consistent results from the plant’s products.

    Backcrossing is the practice of cross-pollinating the new strain with itself or one of the parent plants. After multiple generations of crossing brothers, sisters, and parents based on their desirable traits, greater homozygosity can be achieved, allowing the seeds to stabilize their variability over time. This is because, over generations of inbreeding the plants, homozygous genes become dominant and are eventually always present in the seeds, and undesirable traits are gradually eliminated from the gene pool until they are no longer expressed. By inbreeding the strain in this way, breeders can reinforce the reproduction of desirable characteristics and ultimately stabilize consistent plant genetics to last over generations. 

    1. Documenting

    Finally, it is imperative that you label and document everything. It is crucial to keep track of which parents produced certain seeds, when the plants were pollinated, when the seeds were harvested, and which resulting plants are best for breeding again. Without documenting the results, there is no way for you to keep track of what procedures worked best and what plant crossings and trait expressions were ideal for reproducing, which can impede your breeding progress.

    Additionally, since breeding is a lengthy endeavor, you may want to return to certain seeds to either continue your breeding efforts or just to grow for the sake of having more cannabis. Either way, it is interesting and potentially useful to note down which pairings created which offspring.

    Get to Growing!

    Now you have some starter information to take the plunge into the world of cannabis plant breeding, as well as perhaps a newfound appreciation for the incredible amount of labor, resources, and time that went into the development of your favorite strains. Although it is no easy task, creating your own cannabis variety can be a fascinating way to enjoy a custom, exclusive cannabis experience.

    If you enjoy plant-keeping already, breeding your own cannabis strain can provide a rewarding way to take your skills to the next level. If you are not so experienced with plants, there may be a learning curve, but breeding success is still possible – perhaps you will find that you have a talent for it. Overall, producing a unique variety of cannabis plants can be a challenge at first, but with practice and devotion, you can someday find yourself smoking the only bowl in the world containing your own personal brand-new cannabis strain. 

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