Ever wanted to brew cannabis like you brew craft beer? At the University of California, Berkeley, synthetic biologists have managed to engineer brewer’s yeast so that it produces the main cannabinoids found in marijuana. Here’s why that’s so darn exciting — and what it means.
The above conversation, no doubt set to a background of contemplatively munched pizza and roots reggae, sounds like your typical 1:00am conversation among first year college students. It’s the kind of idea that sounds brilliant in the wee hours of the morning, but And it’s the kind of idea that, if remembered at all, sounds entirely impossible in the cold light of day.
Yet despite how far-fetched it might sound, someone — or rather a team of someones — has pulled it off. At the University of California, Berkeley, synthetic biologists have managed to engineer brewer’s yeast so that it produces the main cannabinoids found in marijuana: mind-altering THC and the non-psychoactive CBD. Fed only on a diet of sugar, this yeast represents an easy and far cheaper way to produce cannabinoids than is otherwise on offer today.
“We wanted to produce cannabinoids in a better way,” Jay Keasling, a UC Berkeley professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and bioengineering, told Digital Trends. “We took the genes out of cannabis that are responsible for making cannabinoids and combined them with genes from other organisms into brewer’s yeast. The entire process is as simple as brewing beer, except rather than having the yeast make ethanol it makes cannabinoids.”
We’ll stop short of likening Keasling’s journey from respected educator to drug mastermind to the plight of Breaking Bad’s Walter White. Certainly, it doesn’t involve any of the criminality. But it’s nonetheless a tale of how a brilliant chemist can lend their expertise and unique insights to totally change the way we create what (until far too recently in the case of marijuana) was an illicit high. In short: move over weed connoisseurs, there’s a new sheriff in town!
“This is the kind of work that my lab has been doing for decades,” he said. “A little over 10 years ago, we took the genes out of a plant called wormwood and put them into yeast, and then got that yeast to produce the precursor to an antimalarial drug called artemisinin. Artemisinin is normally extracted from wormwood, and we managed to get yeast to produce it.”
This exciting effort was followed by myriad other molecules over the following decade, produced using a similar microbial approach. Then cannabis legalization happened and, with it, a whole new opportunity presented itself. “When we saw that there was interest in cannabinoids, and that the pathway that is naturally found in cannabis had been elucidated, we started to put it into yeast,” he said. “We were very fortunate to get it to work.”
To understand how significantly different the team’s approach is, it’s necessary to consider how cannabinoids are traditionally produced — and what is wrong with this approach.
