Two California women—Eleanor Kuntz and Kerin Law—have created the world's first archive of preserved cannabis specimens. I wrote about their project, Canndor, for Broccoli, the magazine for cannabis lovers.
Here's a short snippet of the article:
When botanists or naturalists need to identify a particular plant, they head to the local herbarium to cross-check existing identified specimens of the plant. Think of a herbarium as a library, only instead of books, it contains dried and labeled plant specimens. In the United States alone, there are hundreds of herbariums—from the Missouri Botanical Garden’s herbarium (one of the world’s most famous, with nearly 7 million specimens) to the one at Harvard University. Worldwide, there are more than 3,000 herbariums.
But until recently, there hasn’t been a single herbarium dedicated to cannabis.
When plant geneticists Eleanor Kuntz and Kerin Law launched their botanical identification company LeafWorks in 2016, they quickly realized the need for one.
At LeafWorks, Kuntz and Law do DNA sequencing tests for the natural products industry, which helps ensure accurate labeling and combats fraud. Herbal companies such as Traditional Medicinals will send small samples of herb particulate to LeafWorks be sure that it is what their suppliers say it is.
“If we’re going to do a test on ashwagandha or gingko, we’ll go to an herbarium and get vetted samples that occur throughout the plant range,” says Kuntz, who studied with renowned American herbalist Rosemary Gladstar. Through their connections at the Missouri Botanical Garden and Kew Gardens in England (where Kuntz interned for a summer), the two scientists are able to access fingernail-sized pieces of dried plant matter so they can sequence its DNA. (In some cases, herbariums have their own DNA banks, in which case they can share the plant’s sequence with LeafWorks.) Kuntz and Law then uses those samples as a baseline for future tests on that species of plant.
To continue reading, get your copy of issue #10 on newsstands now or download a PDF of my article here: