Jake Stout

TL;DR: The availability of the Cannabis sativa genome enables the study of a multifunctional plant that occupies a unique role in human culture and will aid the development of therapeutic marijuana strains with tailored cannabinoid profiles and provide a basis for the breeding of hemp with improved agronomic characteristics.

TL;DR: This work shows that a type III PKS (tetraketide synthase) from cannabis trichomes requires the presence of a polyketide cyclase enzyme, olivetolic acid cyclase (OAC), which catalyzes a C2–C7 intramolecular aldol condensation with carboxylate retention to form OA.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors characterized an allelic series of Arabidopsis reduced epidermal fluorescence 3 (ref3) mutants, each of which harbor mis-sense mutations in C4H (At2g30490).

TL;DR: It is shown that marijuana and hemp are significantly differentiated at a genome-wide level, demonstrating that the distinction between these populations is not limited to genes underlying THC production, and that marijuana strain names often do not reflect a meaningful genetic identity.

TL;DR: A data-mining framework is established, employing next-generation sequencing and computational algorithms, to construct and analyze the transcriptomes of 75 non-model plants that produce compounds of interest for biotechnological applications and the selection of biosynthetic gene candidates associated with six specialized metabolic pathways is described.