Herbarium Science & Plant Genetics

The scientific research for this project includes herbarium and genetic sequencing. The herbaria component is a foundational method to define genetic resources. An herbarium (plural: herbaria) is a collection of preserved plant specimens and associated data used for scientific study. Working with the communities, the project will voucher 100 plant specimens in each of the six rural study areas and up to 100 total plant specimens in the urban regions. The vouchers act as immutable references of the plants and will be linked to descriptive data of the cultivars, growing environments, cultivation techniques and methods. Vouchers will be held as a community resource as a special collection with Canndor Herbarium. In each of the six rural regions, researchers will support community members in selecting two cultivars of significant importance for Cultivar Registration with LeafWorks. A Cultivar Registration is a document linking herbarium vouchers with formal botanical descriptions and genetic sequence data (see genetic sequencing component below) that can then be used to verify a given plant material as that specifically defined cultivar, thereby supporting commercial licensing and IP protections.

In addition to the Canndor Herbarium, the project’s Community Advisory Board will offer input on the selection of a local community-based organization within one of the research regions to mentor in establishing a local herbarium of their regional voucher specimens. This will serve as a demonstration project for developing and stewarding a local herbarium, and it will guide the process of establishing the specific terms for access to the collection, including access for community members, researchers, and the public. The herbaria research will also result in the documentation of a community language of cannabis genetics (i.e., the naming conventions that make sense to the communities), with which scientists will need to coordinate to interpret the plants’ breeding histories.

The genetics sequencing component of the research builds upon the herbaria work, pursuing a comparative analysis of the genetic diversity between a legacy farming region with a significant number of licensed farms, and a legacy farming region that has to date not yet had a path to licensure. This study will provide a better understanding of the effects of California legalization and regulation on legacy plant diversity and persistence, and how access to licensure and market dynamics affects this diversity. To do this, a minimum of 100 cannabis plants that have been submitted to the herbarium will be deep-sequenced, including (a) sampling 40 plants from a licensed community (i.e., Humboldt County), with 20 submissions from licensed legacy operators and 20 submissions from unlicensed personal/medical legacy cultivators, and (b) sampling 30 plants from an unlicensed personal/medical legacy farming community (i.e., Big Sur community in the Central Coast).

Additionally, approximately six “collectors” (individuals with diverse and/or historic collections of seeds or plants), who are representative of both rural and urban communities, will donate a minimum of 10 plant lineages each to the sequencing component. Oral histories and other interview data, along with input from the project’s Community Advisory Board, will be used to determine the plants chosen for genomic sequencing.

This area of the research will led by Dr. Eleanor Kuntz, co-founder and CEO of LeafWorks and co-founder of Canndor Herbarium. Her team of scientists will work with the community in the vouchering and herbarium process and maintain the special collection at the Canndor Herbarium. They will also conduct all genetic sequencing and analysis of plant genetic and chemical diversity. With community and individual permission, select qualitative and quantitative data from this analysis will be made available via a genomic database.