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Urist
The Dwarf



Registered: 02/11/15
Posts: 372
Loc: A Dwarf Fortress
Last seen: 5 months, 17 days
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GMO Ethnobotanicals
#22198589 - 09/06/15 06:22 PM (8 years, 4 months ago) |
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I am neither a botanist nor a geneticist and this is a highly theoretical and borderline fictional discussion. Feel free to tell me if any of my ideas are fundamentally impossible or unfeasible within plausible rates of technological advancement. Just don't be a dick about it.
Ok so, corporations like Monsanto have been creating genetically modified food crops for decades (and if you think that automatically makes them bad you should do some research). Judging by the current global attitude towards drugs and the current availability (or unavailability) of genetic modification technology, the next plant to be genetically altered for recreational use since Tobacco is obviously going to be Cannabis. By genetically altered I mean having genes inserted artificially as opposed to breeding desirable traits.
Eventually (probably a few years after federal cannabis legalization)it will be possible for scientists to take traits from other organisms and insert them into Cannabis. Making other plants produce THC would be far more more difficult (but not quite impossible given time) since there are no natural analogues to THC (at least none that I could find.
There are obviously very practical applications of such technology like the ones used on food crops to provide resistance to pests, climate, disease etc...but those are already very possible and also pretty mundane. So I'm going to give a few fantastical examples that may or may not be possible in the near to distant future.
Cannabis that can reproduce via runners. This would make male plants largely basically worthless, drastically reduce the cost of successive harvests and increase production speed and would make strain quality-control extremely simple.
The ability choose which Terpenes and Terpenoids are present in a Cannabis strain would likely increase the quality of a strain's scent and flavor. Many strains come damn close to mimicking fruits and other distinct profiles without genetic alteration, imagine how tasty some GMO Girl Scout Cookies would be.
I could go on like this but Cannabis doesn't have a whole lot of potential for manipulation, it's just likely to be the first interesting plant to be a GMO.
What I am looking forward to, if I even live until then, is the day when genetic modification becomes available to clandestine labs.
Various plants could be made to produce large amounts of psychoactive chemicals that they naturally produce in trace amounts. Some could be made to produce previously synthetic analogues to natural alkaloids. Hell, plants could be taken out of the equation all together and we could have bacteria that just excrete drugs.
Once this technology becomes less expensive and more commonplace it will be not only available, but lucrative for clandestine drug manufacturers. This would reduce the cost of production in the long run and increase the availability of all drugs, probably advancing to include rare, synthetic chemicals like LSD, MDMA and various psychedelic tryptamines and phenethylamines I've only ever heard of.
So what do you guys think are some possible applications of genetic modification and when do you guys think we'll start seeing cannabis and other ethnobotanicals actually being modified for recreational use? (assuming they aren't already)
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Prisoner#1
Even Dumber ThanAdvertized!


Registered: 01/22/03
Posts: 193,665
Loc: Pvt. Pubfag NutSuck
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Re: GMO Ethnobotanicals [Re: Urist]
#22198619 - 09/06/15 06:31 PM (8 years, 4 months ago) |
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Quote:
Urist said: Ok so, corporations like Monsanto have been creating genetically modified food crops for decades (and if you think that automatically makes them bad you should do some research).
thank you for not forcing me to suffocate you betwixt my buttocks
Quote:
I could go on like this but Cannabis doesn't have a whole lot of potential for manipulation, it's just likely to be the first interesting plant to be a GMO.
genetic modification can be as simple as switching on or off certain genes that could increase potency and disease resistance, it's not always 'gene splicing' with other organisms, marijuana has as much potential for genetic modification as any other organism and to be honest, it's all pretty amazing because we could eventually be doing the same with people
personally, I want to be blended with octopus DNA so I could have 8 arms to grope girls with
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Urist
The Dwarf



Registered: 02/11/15
Posts: 372
Loc: A Dwarf Fortress
Last seen: 5 months, 17 days
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Yeah I guess that just activating genes already present in the plant would be simpler, forgot you could do that tbh, we could also activate atavistic traits that would do god knows what...like that chicken with dinosaur teeth. It could even tell us a bit about how Cannabis evolved...
Edited by Urist (09/06/15 07:00 PM)
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