Most of the time, when we hear someone talk about cannabis genetics, the first thing that comes to mind is a pack of seeds. But it goes a lot deeper than that, and as cannabis continues to get more and more normalized across America, scientists are beginning to dive even further into the genetic traits that make the heat the heat.

We sat down with LeafWorks to hear the latest in cannabis genomics and how they’re using science to create value for the industry. Ph.D.s Eleanor Kuntz and Kerin Law originally founded the company on the eve of California’s Proposition 64 vote that legalized cannabis for adult use in the Golden State. Kuntz brought the market experience from her work with natural product companies with a global footprint, while Law had just finished her Ph.D. in developing next-generation sequencing methodologies that would harness the power of the tech at more affordable rates.

According to LeafWorks, its primary concern at the moment is cracking the genetic code of cannabis to offer a ton of DNA-based services regarding what plants are being bought, sold, bred, and grown. As they chase this dream, a huge backbone for continuing toward that goal has been the company’s cannabis plant sex tests, which can identify male plants early in the growing cycle.

“I think it’s kind of always been on our radar, but it made sense to do something about it,” Kuntz said of the opportunities at the crossroads of cannabis and DNA testing. “In 2016, when we formed LeafWorks, it was really a more abstract concept at the time where we were looking at it more explicitly through the lens of natural products.”

Kuntz pointed out how big identity is in natural foods markets. She used the metaphor of how irritated someone would be if they ordered green tea and got echinacea instead in comparison to cannabis that’s completely mislabeled.

The Sex Test

LeafWorks was one of the first companies to sequence the male and female genomes of the cannabis plant. This led to the company offering the first plant sexing test on the market.

“That was really what’s been our bread and butter test for us,” Law told High Times. “And we focused on cannabis because, unlike a lot of these other major crops, there’s no infrastructure, no one to help people get ready to go. And so we built that for the cannabis industry, starting with the most fundamental issue as soon as seedlings pop up. Is this a boy or a girl? And then we’ve developed it outward.”

With the sex test laying the foundation, they expanded further into pathogen identification and identity services. Law argued there are lots of different aspects of the cannabis industry that will benefit from genetic identification. That could mean proving something is that phenotype that dumps a lot of hash or confirming that a clone’s identity is what you’re being promised before buying it.

Pathogens are also a massive issue in the cannabis industry. Whole nurseries have collapsed after grows were infected, and others have hit the brink but survived after unknowingly spreading pathogens. So, clean plants are a big deal if you’re trying to keep the boat afloat.

Hop Latent Viroid Helps Pay The Bills

Kuntz argued that we’re a lot further along than the days when you could sell anything.

“The more refined your market gets, and the more saturated your market gets, the more quality and efficiencies within your own operation become important to you,” Kuntz said, noting how fundamental clean plants are to everything else being a success. “It’s really important to have clean plants because they survive better and they produce higher quality when you’re looking at the chemistry of the higher-quality product. And so I think there’s been a lot more attention and just a lot more knowledge about some of the detrimental effects of the pests and pathogens.”

After LeafWorks’s sex tests, checking plants for hop latent viroid disease and other pathogens is the company’s most common service. The symptoms of hop latent viroid are devastating to a commercial crop. They include shorter internodal spacing, smaller leaves, stunting, malformation, reduced vigor, lower water intake, reduced flower mass, and fewer trichomes.

Law said that at first, people tend to be hesitant to spend the money to get the hop latent viroid test, but some of LeafWorks’s steadiest customers have been people who didn’t test their moms and ended up battling hop latent for a season.

“Since then, we have very steady customers who realize that early and consistent testing really pays out in the end because otherwise, you lose such a high percentage of your yield,” Law said.

The pair estimated that roughly 80% of the growers they work with have come across plants with hop latent viroid. Kuntz described the situation as pretty bad everywhere.

When people first started testing for hop latent viroid disease in the mid-2010s, it was a costly process. The earliest forms of testing would cost thousands of dollars to check an individual plant. LeafWorks’s pathogen test initially only cost $50 bucks when it was first launched. In the years since the economics of scale has allowed the company to cut that price in half to $25.

“More testing makes it easier to lower costs. And I think it’s also important with the hop latent to make it at a price point where people can do the testing appropriately,” Kuntz said.

Kuntz explained the issue with a latent pathogen is that you can test a single plant and still not identify the disease because you have to test the tissue that the virus is in, and the test sample may not contain it. And so if it is latent in the plant, you can test an aerial part of the plant (or any part that is above ground, such as stems, leaves, or flowers), and the tests can still come back as healthy because that particular tissue doesn’t have the virus in it.

“But then as soon as you flip the lights or you stress the plants out, you overwater, you underwater it too much, UV, whatever it is, then all of a sudden the viroid explodes and moves through the plant,” Kuntz explained. “And then you can catch it more easily in all the tissue types. So I think it’s important to keep that price at a point where people can recurrently test their moms, especially so they can really know what’s going on with them.”

When people think of laboratory testing and cannabis, they usually fall into two groups of thought. The first is the safety aspect of ensuring no heavy metals or pesticides. The second is understanding what’s in the plant and is less safety-oriented but more focused on how much THC or terpenes are contained within. We asked the founders what they think people overlook the most regarding cannabis lab testing. Law believes people are yet to truly embrace the value of sex testing even though it’s a big money space for the company. Law argues the upfront costs could save growers 20% on operational costs.

The Ghosts of Cannabis DNA Past

One thing that held back cannabis DNA testing with growers occurred in 2019 when one company took private genetics from OG growers and promised them they would provide DNA markers to help protect their life’s work in the industry to come. The company ended up using the cuts to try and breed their own super strains, and as you can imagine, it left a horrible taste in people’s mouths.

Another problem was knowing if the material that a testing company got was vetted. A person could give them anything and then claim to have the genetic markers for whatever strain they wanted.

We asked the LeafWorks founders if those testing flaws have impacted what they’re trying to do.

“Yeah, and you have the problem of false negatives and false positives, right? So things that are the same are called different things, and things that are different are called the same thing,” Kuntz said. “That doesn’t serve anyone, and it actually acts to erode the value of the immense amount of breeding work and specialization.”

Kuntz further emphasized that she doesn’t think those past events hurt LeafWorks.

“I think what you have to do is you have to actually interface with the community itself,” Kuntz said. “You can’t come from a top-down approach, and I think we’ve learned this in agriculture. That’s never how you do anything.”

The Canndor Herbarium

Our conversation moved on to discuss how far out we are from actually being able to test any cannabis material and have a deep genetic understanding of precisely what it is.

LeafWorks recently received funding from the state of California to lay the groundwork for more in-depth genetic testing. They are working with Cal Poly Humboldt and the Origins Council on the Canndor Herbarium, a project that seeks to preserve the records of cannabis plants.

“It’s really focusing on community-led research, and whereby legacy communities are bringing forward these important plants in our community. These are the definitions and the boundaries of these plants,” Kuntz said. “These are the breeding histories, and then we’re doing the work to do the botanical portions of those definitions so that the community itself can codify those naming systems.”

Kuntz hopes that the Canndor Herbarium will help get the industry to a place where if you go into a store and buy something with a name attached to it, you always get the thing you’re expecting with the name on the container. Kuntz argued that if someone bought a bottle of merlot and a white wine came out, they would be frustrated.

We asked about the agricultural variability aspect of cannabis. Sometimes the same things just don’t turn out the same for a variety of reasons. Kuntz responded with another question: What if the variability is that the plants were never the same?

“The problem is if you have two more moving targets, how can you assess quality? Is it the fact that it’s the same thing and it’s cultivated differently? So that’s why they’ve got differences. Or is it that they’re not the same thing at all? So they’re never going to be able to get to the same point no matter how consistent the cultivation is in regards to location, inputs, whatever,” Kuntz said.

Kuntz went on to argue that variability in biology is what makes specific years or vintage wine more impressive, more expensive, and more sought after long term. She thinks the same will be true with cannabis. There will be specific years for certain cultivars, especially with products that can be stored for longer periods, like hash, that will be more highly sought after and more expensive because it was a particularly good year for specific regions.

Those following the space can expect to see LeafWorks continue to be at the cutting edge of cannabis and DNA.

This article was originally published in the February 2024 issue of High Times Magazine.

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Hop latent viroid (HLVd) is one of the most devastating things ever to hit cannabis, with researchers estimating it could be costing the industry up to $4 billion per year in financial loss. But are the streets safer than the recreational mega-farms that were decimated in the transition to legalization? We reached out to some hitters from both sides of the fence to see if HLVd has had the same impact on the underground cannabis market that it’s had on the recreational market.

For those not in the know, HLVd is one of the worst things to happen to cannabis since the creation of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Currently, the viroid is considered one of the biggest threats to both the global cannabis and hop industries. Viroids are the smallest known infectious agents that can cause diseases in plants. The first viroids were found in potatoes in 1971, and then eventually, HLVd was reported in two out of three varieties of hops in Spain in 1987.

Many plants affected by the disease are also asymptomatic, meaning there are no symptoms or signs of infection early on. Later, the viroid will fully express itself and ruin a plant’s yield and vigor. In the case of cannabis, this prevents a plant from reaching its full potential when producing cannabinoids and all the other good stuff. HLVd’s costs to the cannabis industry have now run well into the billions at this point, and it’s fair to think that the loss may even be over $1 billion on the trap side of the market, too.

HLVd Takes Off

Last year, researchers in Canada and Japan consolidated all the known data about HLVd to get the clearest picture yet. The research, published in the scientific journal Viruses, cited a 2021 survey conducted by Dark Heart Nursery. 

Dark Heart’s founder, Dan Grace, was quick to agree with the idea that HLVd had to come out of the trap. 

“All the genetics we have now came out of the illicit market, that stands to reason,” Grace told High Times. “It’s just a matter of historical facts. The virus was all over the place way before 2017. I mean, we learned about it in the Emerald conferences. Maybe like [in] 2013, people were calling it PCIA for ‘Putative Cannabis Infectious Agent.’”

Grace said people at The Emerald Conference—a cannabis science and psychedelics science event put on by MJBiz Science—were presenting qualitative data at that time when no one knew what HLVd was. Dark Heart’s 2021 survey “showed that it had been growing for years at an exponential rate, as one would expect from a virus,” Grace said, noting HLVd is now everywhere. “But to the question about the illicit market or regulated market, I mean, I guess all I can say is that back when all of us operated in the illicit market, none of us knew what it was or had the resources or anything else to figure out what it is. It’s only with transparency and very transparent, honest communication that we can start to solve the problem.”

Dark Heart was one of the first organizations to identify HLVd in 2019. Two years prior, the nursery began working with Dr. Jeremy Warren, who oversaw the study of intentionally infecting healthy plants with HLVd and analyzed the symptoms of sick versus healthy control plants. Warren confirmed that HLVd was the cause of “dudding” symptoms, such as yellowing leaves or stunted growth.

Dark Heart research included an examination of 100 California cannabis cultivation operations between August 2018 and July 2021 and discovered that in 90% of those grows, one-third of the plants were infected with HLVd.

More research would be necessary to truly understand the scope of HLVd across the thousands of licensed cannabis cultivators in California. Still, it became clear that it was, and continues to be, a serious problem.

Many have attempted to cull plants infected with HLVd, but in reality, a grower’s best bet is to start with clean clones from scratch. To do that, companies reach out to specialized nurseries to buy cuttings started from tissue culture that are ultra pristine and free of disease. One of the popular providers of these cuttings is Node Labs in Petaluma, California.

Given their expertise on the issue, we asked Node Labs’s co-founder and Chief Business Officer Dan Adler-Golden if he thought the compartmentalization of the trap scene from the legal market makes it safer from hop latent viroid. He argued the opposite.

“The trap scene is where hop latent initially thrived and was unknowingly proliferated with some legendary strains for years,” Adler-Golden told High Times. “Because infected plants can be asymptomatic, the lack of information on the viroid combined with minimal screening practices led to widespread contamination among truly elite cuts.”

It’s not crazy to think that as California nurseries transitioned to the legal era, the infected mother plants they brought into the newly birthed rec market came from the unregulated market. It’s not like everyone hunted new genetic stock to go legal at the end of 2017. Adler-Golden explained that Sour Diesel was a famed cut known to have been circulated widely after it was infected.

“It is only in the last few years that pathogen testing has become widely available, and stock can readily be screened,” he said.

We also asked Adler-Golden whether he thought the smaller selection of clones available when the market went rec had the biggest impact on the spread to so many cultivation sites.

“When the market initially went rec, there was a brief window of time when many nurseries were operating and even supplying their clones at retail, resulting in lots of great options for consumers,” he replied. “However, pathogen screening was not common practice, so cultivators would inadvertently introduce the viroid into their stock by purchasing clones from different nurseries.”

Adler-Golden closed, noting that while general pathogen screening services have improved, there are fewer operating today than a few years ago. It’s very difficult for a professional operation to survive handing out dirty cuts anymore.

Information & Prevention

Popular NorCal cultivator Paki Grower believes small isolated unlicensed grows like his have a slim chance of getting infected.

“[In] isolated environments such as homes or small personal gardens, you would think that there’s less possibility if you’re taking your own clones and growing from seed,” Paki Grower told High Times. “That’s very situational because it can jump from room to room and grower to grower so easily. It just depends on who is messing with whose cuts.”

Paki Grower noted that a lot of the genetics he works with are sourced directly from Wyeast Farms. Wyeast is testing all of its cuts every few months. In recent years, researchers found that crossing an infected parent with a healthy one can spread HLVd in the seeds. Tests found the viroid on the outer shell of seeds made from infected parents and within the seeds themselves.

“Wyeast is testing everything he takes into quarantine, and with guys like him having a large collection of heirloom cuts that he might not be able to replace, it’s that much more important to him,” Paki Grower said.

He went on to note that even though he believes he is in a more protected situation, the recreational market is starting to take a better course of action. Things like bleaching tools are an important step, given how easy it is to spread HLVd. Imagine that the first clone you take with a fresh razor is infected; how heartbreaking are those trays of cuts going to be?

And part of the problem is just knowing what you’re looking at. It’s difficult to identify HLVd until it’s too late. Testing is cheaper than ever, but you’ll still need a refined eye.

“I mean, I guess from a grower standpoint, you’re just going to have to pay a lot of attention to detail in the room,” Paki Grower said. “Yes, things can slip by. They can maybe fail to have been detected. Maybe they can pass testing and be hiding and come up at a later time. So the best thing that growers can do is to make sure that every plant that he has is healthy, and if anything is looking out of health, you need to analyze to make sure that it’s not a number of things that aren’t related to that virus.”

Just presuming everything is related to HLVd will make your room susceptible to a host of other issues. You should ensure all those other boxes are checked regularly before presuming your weak crop is infected with the viroid. But if all those boxes are checked, and you believe your room to be pest and stress-free, it might be time to get some testing done. At least that’s more affordable than ever.

We asked Paki Grower if he felt there was the same level of fear in the underground economy as the recreational market when it came to HLVd.

“It’s funny you say that because I’ve worried about it for the last couple of years a lot. And every time I see a plant that’s in kind of crappy health, it could be a user error, it could be an environmental disadvantage. I’m always stressing out about that, dude. That it could be the viroid,” he replied.

But it is admittedly a background concern that pops up instead of a feeling of inherent threat given his practices.

“I still don’t feel threatened because I deal with kind of just a very select few cuts, and I haven’t seen it in my area here, but we’re talking about, you know, smaller spaces,” Paki Grower said. “We’re not talking about big facilities with margins.”

Paki Grower went on to make another interesting point about the famous strains we no longer see in the marketplace. He believes many of the genetics that wore out over time were victims of HLVd.

If anything, it’s pretty clear that HLVd has transcended all types of cannabis cultivation operations regardless of their legality or scale. It comes down to sourcing the genetics you’re selecting for your closet, greenhouse, or warehouse from reputable places and implementing the best practices to keep them free of the viroid.

At the very least, it’s cheap enough to quarantine any new cuttings you bring into the mix and get them tested these days. You only need a little tent and an LED panel to keep it away from the rest of the kids. Then, just hope the test is negative for HLVd.

Hopefully, as cultivators continue to learn more about the disease, even more cost-effective solutions will be discovered.

This article was originally published in the April 2024 issue of High Times Magazine.

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The kids are alright. Weed isn’t making people crazy. Terpenes aren’t all that. And more.

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Across North America, something called Hop Latent Viroid (HLV) is wreaking havoc. This virus-like infection can make plants sickly and destroy harvests. It’s highly contagious. Studies have estimated that perhaps 40% of cannabis flower sold legally in Canada carries HLV. As much as 90% of cannabis in California might be infected, costing billions of dollars […]

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