We take a deep dive with, Dr. Sma Zobayed the Chief Tissue Culture Officer of 'Segra International' in Episode 11 of the Canna Cribs Podcast, where we document history with the pioneers of the global cannabis industry. In this interview, we will deep dive with Dr Zobayed of 'Segra International' about tissue culture and the innovations of the practice within the cannabis industry. Segra International is a company invested in the revolution of ag-tech for the cannabis industry. Founded on the belief that better cannabis starts with better plants. As a global leader in Plant Tissue Culture (PTC), an established method for creating disease-free, true-to-type super plantlets at commercial scale. Segra International has brought this proven agricultural technique to the cannabis industry to help growers grow better plants with greater efficiency. Founded in 2014, we have achieved significant milestones in support of the rapidly maturing cannabis industry
Table of Content
0:00 Opening
1:40 Background on Dr. Sma Zobayed
8:41 Responsibilities at Segra International
16:40 Day-To-Day for Dr. Sma Zobayed
30:28 History of Tissue Culture
37:43 Why Tissue Culture?
43:48 Packaging with Green Vault Systems
44:33 Disease Resistance with Tissue Culture
49:29 Plant Count using Tissue Culture
58:03 Differences Between Cuttings from Tissue Culture
1:03:09 Packaging ROI with Precision Batch by Green Vault Systems
1:04:34 The Future of Tissue Culture
1:11:13 Future Expansion/Projects at Segra International
Questions and Topics in this interview:
-Hello, please tell us a bit about yourself
-Let’s talk about your role as “Chief Tissue Culture Officer” at Segra Intl. -
You’re THE expert in tissue culture - what is it? Same as “micropropagation?”
-More and more cannabis growers are turning to tissue culture, what’s the advantage of tissue culture in a commercial grow?
-It seems like a lot of the cannabis enthusiasts I talk to are a bit wary of science and call anything not “naturally” grown “frankenweed”
-What are your predictions for the future of tissue culture in the cannabis space?
-Do you have any new projects or plans you can tell us about?
- Hey, I'm Nick, creator of Canna Cribs and Growers Network, where we have educated millions of people on how to elevate their craft. I have toured some of the largest grow operations, befriended the best growers, and built a network of the top cannabis companies. Join me on this next adventure, where I document history with the pioneers shaping the global cannabis industry in real time. Welcome to the Canna Cribs Podcast. Welcome back to the Canna Cribs Podcast. I'm your host, Nick Morin. And today's interview is a masterclass on cannabis tissue culture with Dr. Sma Zobayed. He is the Chief Tissue culture officer at Segra International. And in this interview Sma teaches us the basics of cannabis tissue culture, the advantages, and the history of tissue culture in general. We go over his patents in the space, why you should be switching over to tissue culture, and Sma's future predictions for cannabis seeds and tissue culture, and Segra International, enjoy. Thanks for joining us today on this masterclass on cannabis tissue culture. If you're listening to this you're most likely a savvy cannabis business operator. You might be looking to switch over to tissue culture to save time, resources, personnel. And that same mindset applies to post-harvest. And that's why I worked with this company Green Volt Systems to make this episode possible. Stay tuned throughout this interview, I'm gonna talk a little bit more about their precision batching system and how you can really save money in post-harvest by working with their company. All right, now on with the interview. Well, Dr. Zobayed, thank you so much for joining me today. You are the Chief Tissue Culture Officer at Segra International. And I'd love to hear a little bit more about your background.
- Thank you, first of all. Thank you for inviting me for this podcast series. I'm pleased to be here and talk about plant tissue culture, and myself, and Segra International. For those who I haven't met yet, my name is Sma Zobayed. I am the Chief Tissue Culture Officer for Segra International. I did my PhD in tissue culture from University of Hull, England. I am actually working in this field, plant tissue culture for the last 25 years. I started my career as an academic. I actually quickly turned myself as a specialist for industrial scale tissue culture, starting from a simple initiation, multiplication, or even stage three rooting. I have a vast experience in the area of somatic embryogenesis, apical meristem culture, protoplast culture, somatic hybridization. And also, the automation of plant tissue culture process. I have about 50 scientific publications, about several books, and I have about four published patents.
- Wow, well thank you for joining us. I really hope that this can be a masterclass on tissue culture for every grower out there interested in bringing tissue culture into their commercial grow operation. I'd love to dive a little bit deeper into you personally. So, how did you end up in the cannabis industry?
- Okay, let me go back a little bit here when I did my PhD. So, my PhD on tissue culture, again, emphasized in the study of microenvironment in plant tissue culture services, their impact on plant regeneration, growth, and plant health. And then I turned, as I mentioned, that I was becoming an academic. But after that I became an industrial scale tissue culture specialist. And I am working in this area for the last 15 years. Even my PhD work I did for a few years as a consultant for industries. So there's an interest for me to come to industrial scale tissue culture. My job, for example, I can give the example of last job I had is in charity nurseries. I started from scratch to build a lab. First year I had about three to four technicians working with me. And the year I left we had two labs, one in Canada and one in USA. And about 75 technicians actually worked for the production, 13 to 15 million plants yearly production. However, none of these are cannabis. We used to do ornamental horticulture and small fruits production, like blueberry, raspberry, those things. Now, how I came to cannabis, actually, I had a long interest in the field of medicinal plant production and secondary metabolic production growing through tissue culture plants, especially the medicinal plants. While doing my PhD, actually, I never thought, actually, I never knew that I would be working in cannabis industry or cannabis plants. But over the years I was actually curious about this mysterious plant. That led me to con conduct research on cannabis tissue culture. Like I said, I always liked to work with medicinal plants. However, this is one of the plant species which has been highly regulated for many years that not much research has been conducted. So decided why not work something which is new and unique. That's how I ended up coming to cannabis industries.
- I love it. Your curiosity brought you into the industry. And your specific PhD dissertation, did it have anything to do with cannabis at all?
- No, no, it's tissue culture. Basically, basic tissue culture, it's working in the area of microenvironment, the implementation, their effect on plant regeneration, plant growth. For example, I can give an example. If we analyze the gas or the air in the tissue culture vessels air space we have ethyl in there, we have CO2 there. We have oxygen there. We have nitrogen there, obviously. Nitrogen, not much role in the plants, but it's required. My study was basically carbon dioxide or CO2 in the air space and the effect of ethylene. Ethylene is a really low amount, maybe a few PPM, parts per million, maybe one or two. But some plants has diverse effect on if they accumulate. If the tissue culture vessel is outside the plant is open, it can not accumulate. Tissue culture vessel is saved. So, what if the plants produce ethylene? They will be accumulated in the air space. So there is some effect on those accumulated ethylene on plant regeneration, plant growth, plant health. And I found it really interesting after so many years that actually still exists in cannabis industry. So, that's how one of the success is cannabis because I have that background. CO2, yes, CO2 is required for plants. But when the plant has less chlorophyllous tissue they actually produce CO2. That accumulative CO2 can be very high and can be toxic at some point. However, plants with green tissue, green chlorophyllous tissue actually accumulates CO2 from the air space. So they start doing photosynthesis. That we studied. There, the idea of photoautotrophic tissue culture started. We would successfully propagate tissue culture plants in sugar-free media. You know, for the tissue culture we add the sugar in the media as a carbon source. But we are able to successfully propagate plants or grow plants in tissue culture vessel without sugar. And sugar is the main reason for any of the contamination in tissue culture industry. And that's all the requirements because we add sugar. But we we successfully developed a photoautotrophic tissue culture. And after many years we are doing the same thing in cannabis industry. We also developed the tissue culture cannabis plants, which grow photoautotrophically. So yeah, I didn't do my dissertation in cannabis, but all these things came out from that dissertation. It's actually still implemented in the cannabis industry.
- That is excellent, all of it is applicable. And you are leading the front. And you're at Segra International. Can you tell me kind of the scope of your responsibilities at Segra?
- Right, yeah, sure. I can, actually, let me talk about the reason that I have been hired here. When we started Segra international I had been hired basically to develop a vision for them and a strategic plan to guide the whole organization for tissue culture plant production, which including like future expansion, develop new product lines, conduct necessary research and development to improve product quality. Obviously, I oversee the day-to-day operation of the lab, oversee the planning, implementation, execution, and evolution of the projects related to plant tissue culture. Also, the continuous improvement of the product, right, production, process, workflow, plant health, optimization of the yield efficiencies, which is correlated with the budget, budget commitments, and overall production excellence, that kind of things area. Also, another one actually important is to maintain high standard of product quality. Because it's requirement for customer satisfaction. Highly standard product quality is required for the customer satisfaction with order fulfillment. Then, also, definitely determine the staffing requirements, right, where we fit what kind of person we need. And we require we train those kind of work. So, basically, the scope when I started actually, and still now is huge. When we started my ultimate goal was actually to establish a company that would be the pioneer in tissue culture in cannabis industry. Segra is not the first, as I mentioned. That is not the first tissue culture lab for me to start from scratch. I have established at least two more companies, larger companies before I started Segra. I can give an example, which I already mentioned. In my previous job I started only with 7,000, I believe, first year plant production capacity. And the year I left was about 13 to 15 million plants yearly we produced.
- Whoa!
- Yeah, that's true.
- Those are all ornamental and agriculture products. So, the scope at Segra was to implement all of my experience in the area of tissue culture, industry of tissue culture, starting from initiation, production, or multiplication, rooting. And, eventually, quickly bring the plants out of the lab, provide the plants to the grower so that they can actually get the maximum benefits of tissue culture. That all actually came from that knowledge. And I implement it right into tissue culture. And I implemented all the possible scope. And now, actually, we are the pioneers in cannabis tissue culture in North America.
- Wow, well, I was first recommended to you by my mentor, Etienne Fontan, at Berkeley Patient Group. And he said, you have to interview Sma. He is really pushing the envelope in cannabis tissue culture. And you guys are based in Canada, right?
- Right, right.
- Yeah. And you have customers all across North America. Are you guys also global? Are you selling any products around the world?
- Yes, so here is one thing. Legally, we can not actually export to USA, as it is federally not legal. But our market is open in whole world, wherever is federally illegal. So, we have opened our market to European community. We started exporting South Africa. So, we actually can export anywhere in the world, but not in US.
- Yet, right, it should be opening up soon.
- Yeah, but right now it's 2021. Our plan is to enter the US market. The way to the market will be under Segra, but the production and everything will be there. So, that's the plan for 2021, or March, or with another company, something like this, the marketing team is actually currently diversely working on this. So we will be in the US market this year. But we'll not send any plants from the Canadian side. But we'll be producing other sites, that's the plan.
- Yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense. Since you started Sma, what has been your greatest challenge at Segra?
- Well, I think it's for pretty much everybody, the biggest challenge is, or was the unknown of the industry. I can give some examples. When I started, actually, tissue culture was really unknown to many cannabis growers in Canada. Unknown also for us, unknown cultivar stability. We don't know anything about cannabis and possibility of somaclonal variation, presence of virus in the plants. There is nothing developed for diagnose virus. You can not do, and no published paper where you can find it. Okay, I can send it this. I follow this protocol to find out if there is any virus or not. We do our best, but there may be leaked out one or two virus. There's the normal procedure for agriculture horticulture industry. You have to screen the virus every steps. But we don't have any tools to test.
- There's no precedent set yet. I mean, you are setting the precedent in your research.
- Yeah, that's true. Fortunately, Segra actually developed a generic lab. And we started doing DNA fingerprinting, monitor the plants stability in tissue culture process. Virus testing for cannabis plant, as I mentioned, is really limited. But recently, a few companies came up with some new essays to detect the virus. For us it was make things easier now. Like, we are much more comfortable now than a year ago that, okay, we can screen any somaclonal variation happening. We can screen to detect any virus that has leaked out somehow in the system. If that we go back and restart that apical meristem. So, there's tools that are currently available. So we are in much better shape. For multiplication and initiation process, I would say we're lucky that we started with a very efficient protocol. And we are continuously ahead of our competitors. But we are continuously doing the R and D to improve any of these systems, so we will be always ahead of our competitors.
- Wow, and who would be a competitor on a global scale to Segra in the cannabis industry?
- Well, right now, I have no clue. We have few competitors, or one or two competitors in US. But I don't see anybody in Canada. But right now I can see we are way ahead of all of our competitors. That I can say.
- Yeah, well, that's good to hear. And that's a good place to be in.
- [Dr. Zobayed] Exactly!
- Yeah, so they're kind of following in your footsteps. You guys are blazing the path forward for all of us. So thank you for that. I mean, you're really pushing, the future of the cannabis plant forward. I love to learn about that. You must be a pretty busy guy. What's a day-to-day for you? You know, what's a typical week for ya?
- Yeah, interesting question. Thanks for asking that. Overseer, basically, oversees the lab day-to-day operations. Although, I have a few managers working in different area, medium preparation manager, a production manager, lab manager. So, they are looking over those, but I oversee all these procedures. Sometimes I help to do the production planning. The planning is really important for tissue culture. Because without planning you should not do anything. If you require how much plants, like, if you have an order of say few thousand, for some cultivars you go back and make the production planning for those. Otherwise, you should not bring it out. Labor is expensive, and you waste the labor here. I also do the regular meeting with lab management team to give the direction, as I mentioned. I also have, which is important for me, is meeting with the company management team, or the corporate team, and also the marketing team to upgrade the lab status. Say we have some plants coming or some plants extra, I have to inform our marketing team. They have to find a room. So, it's really important for me to continuously upgrade our marketing team the status of each of these cultivars. We have about a 155, a 160 different cultivars in our library right now. So, it's a big, big collections we have to inform all the time. I've also held a media team if required, if they ask. Troubleshooting, for example, for regeneration protocol if some cultivars newly arrived and doesn't like the current protocol, we develop a new protocol. So, I jump in and help that R and D team to find out what is the best protocol will be for these new cultivars. As I mentioned, the discussion with the R and D team, that's how it's going ahead. So, R and D, we have a strong R and D team also. And I'm deeply involved with the R and D team.
- Yeah, well, I bet with more discoveries it leads your business into potentially different paths, different countries. And kind of your day-to-day evolves with that, so super exciting. This interview is really a masterclass on tissue culture. And I really want to dive into tissue culture in the cannabis space. So, let's start at the very top, Sma. What is tissue culture?
- Okay, tissue culture, actually, basically is a collection of techniques. With a tissue culture what we do is maintain or grow plant cells, tissues, or organs under sterile conditions on a nutrient culture media, which we design. It's a known composition. It's widely used, the techniques called micropropagation to propagate. But there is a lot of other techniques. As I mentioned before, there is somatic embryogenesis, somatic hybridization, meristem culture, apical, sorry. Yeah, a lot of different techniques actually involved in tissue cultures, so a combination of all. But most of the commonly used technique is micropropagation. Yeah, so I can give the process a little bit different if you are interested.
- Yeah, let's dive into the basic process, and maybe through the lens of a commercial grower that's looking to implement it for the first time. And then we can take it all the way to the most seasoned growers in the world. And how can they do tissue culture at scale? What does that process look like?
- Okay, let me explain from the beginning, as you mentioned. If we start from the initiation, first of all, tissue culture has four different steps. One is the initiation. Second one is the multiplication or production. Third is the in vitro rooting. And fourth is the acclimatization. Let's start with the initiation first. I'm making a very simple way. Initiation is when you receive a plant or a mother plant, we should say, we take the tissue from that plant. Now, tissue could be an apical meristem, could be shoot tip, could be leaf disk, could be nodal cutting, anything. Depends what you want to do. You want to get rid of virus. You know that it has a virus, you must be going through apical meristem. So, it depends on what you want, right? We take a tissue part, we do that. After taking the tissues in Segra we implemented a protocol, where the first thing we do, the virus test, internal, external. We also do the DNA fingerprinting when they arrived in the facilities, the plant material. We want to check the DNA fingerprinting. We save this fingerprint in our system. So that after six months or a year we send back the plants. We also do the fingerprinting, so we can match, okay, we received these DNA fingerprinting plants. And we are sending the same one, it's matching. So that's the reason we do. Going back, after a surface sterilization we inoculate in the initiation media, which is supplemented with different growth regulators that are required for initiate the plants. Going back a little bit here is what is surface sterilization? Surface sterilization is actually cleaning the plants. Basically, the surface of each of the apical meristem. Its the cleaning the surface of the apical meristem, or leaf disc, anything. We use different chemicals to clean. That should get rid of all bacteria and fungus. And through the apical meristem culture you get rid of virus. And we use some of these other techniques here. I don't know how to explain this part, but to get rid of virus, and bacteria, and fungus. The idea here is to clean the plants. Sometimes in this position some plants have internal intracellular bacteria, which is hard to clean. Surface sterilize will not clean the intercellular bacteria. There's another procedure. You still bring the plants in the test tube phase. Grow them in the initiation phase. And there is a technique after that you implement to get rid of the intracellular bacteria. Finally, after three to six months, the clean plant, we keep it. Some of this, 10, 15, 20% probably not clean. So we throw those away, we destroy those. And only the clean tissues we keep in our system. Now, here, one important thing is that when you have the plants outside you have the plant they're growing, right? They are growing with them and getting bigger and bigger. But we don't want to grow plants inside the tissue culture vessel, we want to propagate them. So, there is a requirement to change the physiology of the plants. When we bring it inside we change the growth regulator, where that is oxygen and cytokinesis ratio, which the outside plants have, but we alter it slowly to bring the plants to the multiplication mode or propagation mode. That's required, basically, again three to six months. So, cleaning and the changing is a three to six months procedure. But if you do the apical meristem it'll probably require more time, about nine to 12 months procedure to bring the plants. After that is the multiplication phase. What multiplication is is actually replicating. You clean plants, you have everything ready. Now, you successfully initiated the plants. The next procedure is you just multiply and increase your inventory. Multiplication continues depends on your amount of plants you needed. 100 plants is very simple, two, three months, you're ready to start giving, as long as you have to stop. If you needed a million plants you have to keep multiplying, get your inventory. Say at some point you have 16 plants, next transfer could be like 64 plants, another transfer. So it's increasing four times, or two times, or three times, whatever the multiplication cycle. And at some point say you have 250,000 plants. One more transfer you can make a million plants. So, what do you do in 750,000 plants, you send it to the stage three rooting. And keep 250 in your inventory. Give another transfer. Those 250 you can make again a million. Whereas, 750, you already rooted plants you're sending to the field or to the growers to grow. And you cycle, as long as the demand is there. You keep recycling that one. And you have always fresh plants coming from the lab nonstop. Now, if you have 1000 plants requirement your planning will be different. Only difference, you start giving earlier. And when a million plants or 750,000 plants you have to do the inventory. The process is all the same.
- Okay.
- So, that's what we call multiplication. And I already mentioned stage three, which stage three is rooting, in vitro rooting. So, you grow the plants, elongated shoots. Put in the special media to root the plants, small roots. As soon as like a few millimeters, we don't let them grow too much big roots. We let them just small, few millimeter roots. And then we send it out of their environment, which is called ex vitro condition. And let the shootlets or plantlets to acclimatize in the outer environment. And eventually the grower will have those plants. That's the the basic procedure for whole tissue culture industry.
- And is that a single cultivar? Or are you doing all that multiplication with multiple cultivars at once?
- We can do multiple cultivars in once, depends on your workforce. We can do single. What we are doing at Segra, I can give an example, we receive plants. Right now we already initiated, and everything is in a multiplication, up to 160 different cultivar. Now, if we receive say, we received plants today. So we will do the procedure, everything, cleaning and everything starting today. And we have a team. They are continuing this one from initiation three months to six months time they're going into production. But if we receive other plants from another plant tomorrow, this will also continue. Basically, our procedure is we can accept four mother plants in a week. We try, we can do it if we increase our technicians. But right now we developed a system. That maximum amount is four mother plants we can receive in a week. So we can put all the procedures starting from DNA fingerprinting, virus tests, initiation, multiplication, and rooting. So, that's our procedure. And our library is increasing every day.
- I bet, and that's the basic process. Now, can we crank it up a couple notches for some of our more advanced seasoned growers? What would tissue culture at scale look like beyond that basic process?
- For the seasoned growers, like you talking about, say for outside growers, or for indoors is very simple. Year around they're producing. We produce, we give it, so its a process. For year-round production, which is really common, and actually is always common in agriculture industry because agriculture is seasonal. You know that, horticulture, springtime you bring all the plants out, and fall time, summer, and winter we don't. Here and there a few. Same thing here. For a client, which required the plants in spring, we start to grow some plants they require cultivars back to previous fall, depending on the number. And then we increase the production up to some point. Say, we need 40,000 for one cultivar, we'll go to 40,000, and some extra for us, obviously. And we send right before spring, it's about 30 days procedure to do the in vitro rooting. So, we produce those plants. The way we do the planning is that we'll start that stage three a month earlier than the desired supply date. So once that the plants rooted, then in a deserved time we send it to our growers. In this case it's a little bit different. We keep only a small limited number of plants and send everything. Because their plants may require next year again. So we don't want to build up dust and maintain a huge stock. It's a waste of labor. So, that's the only difference, we keep it a smaller number. Some of this facility in the tissue culture we develop as low temperature storage space, small grow room with a lower temperature. Actually, you can store your plant material over there. And it requires very less transfers, so you don't spend a lot of labor, maybe two, three months, which you go back and give a transfer. You can store there forever, whenever you need. But for seasonal plants we plan this way, that, okay, we need one time yearly if this is going all out. And then we'll keep the rest in our storage. And then we just maintain. And next fall we'll start the production again, depending on the numbers.
- Okay, let's go back all the way to the invention of tissue culture. When did it first start? And what was the agricultural context? You know, what were they creating or inventing tissue culture for?
- Right, actually, as you mentioned agriculture is my favorite area too. Plant tissue culture is actually playing a big vital role in the area of agriculture, and horticulture, and plant breeding also. They complement the crop production through micropropagation, synthetic seed production, somaclonal variation, which is for creating new varieties or new cultivars. Hybridization, genetic transformation, haploid culture, pathogen irrigation, which is really important for cannabis also. Also for germ preservation, which is also cannabis industry adopting these two things, right? Plant tissue culture, actually, it's contributed in the field of science for the last 100 years. So, when the first tissue culture was developed and occurred, we didn't see the effect of its agriculture value for 100 years ago. But it's contributed different other techniques in science. However, commercial agriculture industry actually adopted the technique for the last 40 years, I would say, about the last 40 years. And first crop, I believe it was like commercial production for potato, banana. Those are the oldest crops that came to them in agriculture.
- Really, it started with bananas?
- Potato, actually, the first one. And then, banana, strawberry. Right now we are producing a huge amount of blueberries, all the blueberries. Actually, strawberry is really interesting. Like Driscoll , for example is the biggest strawberry production. And all their strawberries coming through tissue culture. Because they have to be a tissue culture. Because the potential of the soil and the potential for virus infection is there.
- It's too high.
- So they always start fresh. And come through there, the biggest tissue culture lab they have. And billions of strawberry plants through tissue culture they are producing. And in California, actually, the bank will not give a loan to a strawberry grower if you don't have a link with a tissue culture company while you're getting the tissue culture products.
- Oh, my gosh, it's that far advanced in that sector.
- Yes, exactly, so you can see where we are. And when we started the cannabis we were struggling to convince growers you need the tissue culture plants, right? Orchid is one of the ornamental horticulture product which is all done with tissue culture. And countries like Singapore, Thailand, they have the biggest economic coming from orchid tissue culture. There's so many tissue culture companies there. They're producing all of this throughout the world they're supplying, right? It's a huge industry of tissue culture for agriculture and horticulture.
- Yeah, why do you think Sma that it took so long for the cannabis industry to adopt tissue culture?
- I would say one of the issue, that was actually legalization. This crop was prohibited for many, many years, right? There's not much scope for the mainstream scientists to go and work and conduct research. I personally tried when I was in the University of Guelph. Obviously, so many paperwork you have to do, so much to get the approval from the federal government. It's so much paperwork. Sometimes you gave up, you can not even do. On the other hand, growers could not take the advantage of science or tissue culture, right? So they are growing their own way, cloning, and everything. You can not take the advantage of tissue culture. Because you don't have the access to them, right? Even after legalization it took a long time for people to understand the benefit of tissue culture. Before legalization cannabis was allowed to grow with limited numbers also. So, say you have in Canada we have some growers allowed to grow for health purpose, medicinal requirement. But you're allowed only a few, like 50 plants. Or right now it's four. But at some point you're allowed 50 plants, 100 plants. In that small scale growers think, why do you need tissue culture, right? You probably don't need the take the advantage of tissue culture because scaling up is one of the important things for tissue culture. A small number, it doesn't work. So there doesn't need that one. But that habit when legalization finally came in 2017, October. The habit is still there. Culture took a long time to work out that, okay, we can do that. They're really good. I would say they're really good at doing cutting and everything. And really easily, they can produce hundreds and thousands of plants. But when you do that above thousand or millions it's not possible. They realize finally. Because they never did that scale production. So the growers who worked for pre-legalization period, which as I mentioned, have a lot of experience. I respect them, they are the only people actually, had some in-hand experience after legalization, right? So we have to use them. Nobody else knows how to grow plants, so they are the people. And they came, and they said, okay, we can do the cutting. So we got that knowledge, and everything we use. But that's how tissue culture's a little bit behind. But it's coming back, right, it's coming back a lot. A lot of companies actually looking for tissue culture nowadays. I can see the big change last one year in Canada.
- I bet, so it's trending towards more tissue culture. And some of the reasons you highlighted, you know, legalization and kind of holding back the research. Smaller plant count, so if you're growing at home either in Canada, or the US, somewhere else, you might not need tissue culture as much. And then kind of both of those things led to kind of lack of experience. And tissue culture, you said it's been around for 40 years in traditional agriculture. So it's just coming around to cannabis. I mean, I'm glad we have it now. And I personally first saw tissue culture at scale at Tikun Olam. As a Cannacribs episode we filmed their lab director Ulric. He actually had experience with tissue culture in tobacco and specifically trying to get rid of diseases that were specific to the tobacco plant. So it was really cool to learn from him. And definitely cool to learn from you today as well. For any growers out there that maybe they're used to working with seeds directly. They do a lot of micropropagation that way. How would you convince them to switch over to tissue culture?
- Seeds, same as clones, right? Both, actually, you can not guarantee they're pathogen free. A tissue culture can provide you pathogen-free plant production. Seeds can carry the virus generation after generation, as you know. Another thing about the seed is genetic variability. Every generation there may be variation in the genetic code they have to cross to produce.
- Genetic drift?
- Yeah, genetic drift. Actually, so it's two parents produce one seed, so obviously, a character from two of these can produce different variants. So, depending on the pollination, so seed to seed always is not identical. You do the DNA fingerprint, you probably will not get identical seed, unless you do a lot of homogenization. And then at the end you may produce, but it's a lot of hassle. But seed market is like any agriculture industry. Seed market is there. Parallelly, tissue culture is there. So, what I can see that eventually seed will be there in a limited scale. We will not eliminate the seed because it will be there always in agriculture also. But the tissue culture grow itself. Because people see the advantage of tissue culture. People see that the growth, extra benefit, what you bring in tissue culture is not in the seeds automatically. Some people divert, some people stay. But what I can see that seeds probably will be more convenient for the outer grower at some point. But all the indoors will keep it tissue culture, right, so it's easy to handle it and everything. But, again, getting the maximum benefits, tissue culture will be there at some point. Right now it's limited and limited to go. Like, whether for Canada it's limited. We're a colder climate, so it's a limited summer. So, if you can plan this way you can prepare the tissue culture plants. You can send it, they can grow, and then get the maximum benefit, bring it out. If not the case, seed will be there as a supplement all the time. But eventually I believe that tissue culture will take over the seed business at some point.
- Yeah, well, I'm kind of imagining there's growers listening to this right now thinking, is it time to move to tissue culture? You know, should I make that switch? So to kind of help them out and help them answer that question, what's that threshold of plant count that you think, okay, maybe zero to 1000 plants you can get away without using tissue culture. But once you cross 1000 you should be doing tissue culture. What's that plant count threshold that you would say?
- I can give another example from agriculture industry. We always say if you ever needed 2000 plants, below don't do tissue culture. That's what we used to say. But cannabis is different, that doesn't work. Even at two plants, sometimes better tissue culture. The reason I'm telling you, years after years doing the cutting, those plants I saw in my experience, those plants when you take the cuttings, you open the cone, the bacteria and fungus enter. The plants are not healthy. So you need to clean those plants. So if you keep doing the cutting your production will be less years after years after years. So you have to start with, for cannabis industry I can see the requirement of tissue culture, even at smaller scale. You have to link with somebody to get the tissue culture plants. You can do the cutting of tissue culture plants, grow them as a mother plant for one or two generations. But you have to link with the tissue culture plants. Because I saw so many plants has intracellular bacteria, virus, and I forget about fungus. Fungus is everywhere anyway. So, clean, and we saw the big difference. When you clean the plants they're big different. Their growth vigor is huge. Their secondary metabolic production is high, flower production is bigger. So, a lot of advantages our growers can see. The people who grow them, they always come back to the tissue culture again. I can give an example, again, to go back to the agriculture blueberry. If we send tissue culture plants, obviously, their vigor is more. They have more branches and everything. So they have a fruit production way more than of cutting plants. And as you know, blueberries are picking up by machine nowadays. Sometimes the machine has problems to pick up. That it is so heavy they can not even lifting up that many fruits. So we have to design the tissue culture plants, reduce the growth regulator, make it less bushier. But they get the cleanliness, again. And they get the better bushiness then the cutting plants. And they will have the better fruits. But you can see the big difference in cutting-derived plants than in tissue culture plants. So you have to require a tissue culture plants for cannabis. Although in cannabis, again, I'm mentioning doing by cutting many years, many years, when moms are really sick we have to start from tissue culture to get the advantage of these plants.
- Okay, well, thank you for sharing that. This has been an excellent introduction to cannabis tissue culture. We're gonna take a quick break, Sma. And when we get back we're really gonna dig into the disease resistance of plants from tissue culture.
- [Dr. Zobayed] Okay, thank you.
- The first time I heard about Green Vault Systems was when we went out to Kings Garden to film a Canna Cribs episode. The Kings Garden team had a serious amount of product leaving that facility on a weekly basis. So they were using the Precision Batcher by Green Vault Systems. And if you're not familiar, think of a packaging system like a body. The Precision Batcher is the heart where it all begins. Everything flows out from there. And the Green Vault Systems team headed up by Lise, she is amazing, they work with clients every day to automate their packaging lines. They design packaging systems for all shapes and sizes with all the automation you can think of. Head on over to the link in the description and check it out. All right, we're back from the break, Sma. And I'd like to learn a little bit more about the disease resistance. I know that you were talking about a lot of the benefits of tissue culture plants. And one of those is the lack of diseases. So, can you teach me a little bit more about that?
- Yeah, definitely. This is really an interesting area for me for tissue culture. Actually, clones are taken from a mom. As I mentioned already, I go back a little bit there, a specific mother plant, for example, which may already have been invaded by many pathogenic and non-pathogenic microorganisms, including fungus, virus, bacteria. Repeated cuttings from mother plants if exposed, as I mentioned before, the cones, right, make the mother plants very vulnerable to the microbes. That's why they're more vulnerable to pathogens. That's why we need the TC, as I mentioned before. This is the resistance. Okay, before going there let me explain a little bit here. The reason for the meristematic tissue are free from virus is these cells actually have a higher rate of metabolism. Their cell division is faster. And virus can not actually replicate inside cells. So, what happened then, most of the virus migrate through vascular bundles. And that part is not connected with vascular bundle. And we use those tips to regenerate the plants. That's how we get to the virus. And surface sterilization clean all of these extra bacteria and fungus, which is much, much easier than cleaning the virus, right? That's one way of doing all this cleaning. And now you're coming to disease resistant. Actually, tissue culture can not produce any disease resistance cultivar. But it can actually produce disease-free plants. How, I just mentioned this one. We do the surface sterilization, we do the meristem culture. So bacteria, fungus, and virus, all we can clean. But if we have a disease resistance cultivar, it's developed through breeding or genetic engineering, we can actually replicate, multiply, and make it available to the growers through tissue culture. That's possible.
- Wow!
- Yeah, we don't create disease resistance cultivar, but we can create disease-free plants. So, that's the big difference. And that's the advantage of a tissue culture to scale up very rapidly if you have a new cultivar coming with disease resistance. So, even when you have a disease resistance they may have some other bacteria, fungus. And you need a tissue culture to clean the other one, so the plant will get the maximum benefit when they try to grow in your growing facilities.
- Okay, and could you give me an example maybe from traditional agriculture of what that disease resistance could ultimately look like? Like, how much crop are you saving, you know, comparatively to non tissue culture?
- Okay, one example I gave you, the blueberries, right? Fruits, three to seven times more blueberry fruits you can produce per plant coming from tissue culture plants than in non tissue culture, or cutting plants, or seed plants in the blueberry industry. Another thing is that strawberry, you don't have any option to produce strawberry plants, which is not coming from tissue culture. Even your produce, your crop will be first year is fine, whereas second year will start to have the virus. First year if you have a clean first year will be fine. Let me correct myself. If you have virus-infected plants you not only have crop failure, you can see this form of the fruit. And nobody wants to buy those kinds of fruits, right? You want good safe fruits, which is free from all disease and everything. So, your production goes higher. So, agriculture industry for some crops is required to have tissue culture plants. Without that you can not. Scaling up is coming after. If you need a million plants, obviously. If you need 1000 plants, 5,000 plants, obviously you need tissue culture. But to get the clean plants you have to come to the tissue culture industry. It's in this industry here.
- Okay, and for all the growers out there thinking, you know, just kind of comparing the advantages of tissue culture and their commercial grow, what would be kind of the plant count increase that you could do maybe at the same cost? You know, maybe they're currently producing 5,000 plants by clones a month, or whatever example you want to do. How could you increase that with tissue culture? You know, what would that benchmark be?
- Right, okay, before going there, just let me explain one more thing here. If you see back to the agriculture, horticulture industry they adopt tissue culture as one of their main production pathway for their success, right? Not only for propagation, for pathogen elimination, for scaling up production, for storing their genetics, right? It's a multifunctional way they take advantage of tissue culture. Same as cannabis, all of this implemented. One more thing here is some of the legal plants, which is very difficult to propagate through cutting. Some of the root membrane variety, some of the exocellular variety, some of the colony varieties, very difficult to do through cutting. And they don't have seeds, enough viable seeds to produce from seeds. So, those cases there is no other alternative, same as strawberry, that you have to produce through tissue culture if you want to do large scale production. So, those company who adopt the tissue culture, they are ahead of everybody else, right? Another advantage here, which is true for cannabis too, is you develop a new cultivar, new variety through breeding program or genetic engineering. Scaling up is only possible through tissue culture. So you can bring it very quickly to the growers. If you went through the cutting, like you have only one plant you develop through breeding, how many years you have to wait through the cutting to bring it to the growers? But if you have using the advantage of tissue culture, you need a little bit of tissue, grow, and produce millions of plants. And then give it to your growers. Very rapidly, you can bring it in the market, which require a few years for you to develop these new cultivars. So, why you have to wait for five, six years to do the cutting and bring it to the clients, right? So, that's the other advantage. Now, asking about the number of plants are scaling up. If your demand is like millions of plants, obviously, you require a tissue culture. Without that you should not even try to do through cuttings of that many plants. It's not possible, it's not a viable option. And the vigor of the growth, vigor, growth of the plant resulted larger actually. We found from our own study that, yes, bigger flower production. Growth is bigger, yes. Ended up resulting that higher secondary metabolic production. Because they are free from pathogens. They don't have to fight for their own survival with the pathogen, intracellular bacteria, fungus, and all of these. So they don't have to fight. They are concerned only the carbon production, or secondary metabolic production, or primary metabolic production. That's how they grow. And their vigor go high. So yeah, again, scaling up, obviously through tissue culture. And you're getting better plant production and maintaining healthier plants in your system, which is a huge advantage.
- Right, and what about, I don't think we talked about this before, but what about controlling the phenotypes? Do you have an increased control on the phenotypes and maybe some genetic manipulation you can do on that cultivar or on that tissue culture plant?
- Genetic manipulation in a tissue culture, no. We do the true to type culture. You bring something, your genetics. We keep the same genetics and give it to you. We'll multiply it. But if there are any somaclonal variation happen during tissue culture process that could be good, that could be bad. We need to test. We can do our system to check is any drifting or any, I shouldn't really use the word drifting, is the somaclonal variation happened or not? If happened, we need to go and see if it's good. Sometimes it's good, sometimes bad. But going back to your question is phenotype. Yes, well, phenotype is you can bring their original phenotypes back. Let's put it this way. Because plant, again, doesn't have to fight back with your bacteria, or intracellular bacteria, or pathogenic, or non-pathogenic bacteria, and fungus, and everything. So your plants grow their maximum possible way. If you give them a maximum optimum growth condition, not only the aerial environment, also the nutrients, and the plant will give you the best possible phenotypes growth. So, you can see that. We can control some extent if you don't need it. But it's some extent because it's mostly is controlled by genetics, so we can not change the genetics. But vigor we can control. If we want to reduce the growth regulators, some of the opposite side of a ratio, we can make it bushier plants. Or we can reduce the growth regulators to make it less bushier plants. Whatever you want, right? That is possible through tissue culture.
- Okay, so increasing and decreasing yield, ultimately?
- Yield, yeah, growth, biomass will be increased our decreasing. But the secondary metabolic production will be maximized always, okay? Whatever the plant usually gave, like, say 22% or 23% TC, that will be tissue culture plants will be had there. But the phenotypes, say you have a growing condition, you don't want indoor you don't want those huge bushy plants. You want a smaller plant, so you can produce. You can give them so they don't have to do less pruning there, right? So you can control that way by controlling the growth regulators to the plants.
- Further saving money in labor costs of cutting down you're pruning. I mean, that's incredible. You know, just being in the cannabis industry, I've personally been in for about five years. I started this company in college. And I've heard a fair amount of conversations around, you know, GMO products, whether that's food or the cannabis we consume. So, are there any myths, Sma, that you can help dispel as far as genetically modified cannabis, and why growers might not want to use tissue culture because maybe some of those older stigmas still might be around?
- Yes, interesting. Again, in the tissue culture industry we do not manipulate the gene. It's not a genetically modified product or crop. You're giving the plants, we just multiply it. It's a very simple procedure. So in the tissue culture industry we never manipulate the gene. If we accidentally happen, we actually do a DNA fingerprinting and find out. And we discard those, unless clients want that. So, in tissue culture not only are all tissue cultures companies, they're just copied true to type production. So, definitely, we don't create any genetically modified product in the tissue culture facilities. Yeah, so it's true to type. Only difference from mother plants or the conventional cutting system we are doing is we first clean the plants. And then do the cutting, through tissue culture though. That's the only difference. You're getting the same plants from plant cutting. And we're giving the same plants. Our plants will be cleaner, vigorous growth, but genetically they are exactly same, right? And another advantage as I mentioned a few times is you can batch off thousands and millions and even give it together. So, there's the only difference I can see, right?
- Right, let's bring it back all the way to the consumer, you know, from tissue culture to sale, instead of seed to sale. So, Pepsi, Coke Challenge. Can you tell any difference from a plant that was grown from tissue culture compared to a cutting from a mother plant?
- Yeah, there's a visible difference. The highly visible difference is, again, if your mother plants is somehow clean, it's new, you may not see much difference initially. But years after years you can see. Because they got contaminated again and again. But I visited so many different facilities. And I saw so many mother plants that are growing in such a condition. And then opening those cones and the gate, the bacteria and fungus entering that system. So, I can see the sick mother plants. So, the cuttings coming from there and the tissue culture will be big, huge difference. Now, if you're moderately grown mother plants, which has some kind of disease, some not disease, some kind of non-pathogenic bacteria and fungus, but you don't see the disease because there is not much pathogenic bacteria or pathogenic fungus, which kill the plants or create the disease. But you can not see that. But still, plant is fighting for hundreds and thousands of non-pathogenic bacteria, or virus, or fungus. You can not see the symptom. But you know that that plant is fighting for food, for everything. So compared with that tissue culture obviously have a better growth, better plants, vigorous, everything, right? That you can see, again, the difference. Now, you just created a brand new plant, and you know it came from the lab or somewhere, and it's clean, first generation you probably not see much difference from that, your mother plants, cuttings with the tissue culture plant. Because both is comparatively clean. The only difference you can see that our plants a little bit bigger because they have the growth regulators there for make them faster. So that's little bit difference you can see. But it's generally not much, five to 10% difference probably you can see.
- Okay, so what about for all of our organic growers out there that maybe they are just adamantly opposed to tissue culture? You know, what would you say to them about the future of cannabis and everything that we've talked about today? Do you think, ultimately, just like strawberries and blueberries, do you think for those grow operations potentially getting loans from the banks in the future or getting access to certain financing, do you think that they're gonna have to convert to tissue culture? Or will there always be a lane for them in the market to grow without tissue culture?
- Yeah, that's actually an interesting question. And you answered that in some extent. Yeah, again, most of us, we knew that strawberry, banana, blueberries, grapes, that all we are eating coming through tissue culture. And all of this you could go to supermarkets, you see the organic banana. You see the regular banana parallelly sitting, both coming through tissue culture. You see the organic strawberry. You see the regular strawberry. Even Driscoll, they are everything coming from tissue culture. They have these food products in the market.
- So, organic is still tissue culture.
- Tissue culture, still tissue culture, right?
- You're growing organically, the only difference is coming either seed, or cutting, or through tissue culture, that's the difference. You're organically grown. By the way, also, some country or some states doesn't require to grow the tissue culture plants organically. So, you take the tissue culture cuttings like a seed, and you grow organically. There's the requirement. But we go and went beyond that. We actually can produce organically, propagate tissue culture plants if the client required. We have the technology in our lab also. So we can produce organic tissue culture plants. And they will never touch the substance or the chemicals required for non-organic plants so we will supply everything organically. And we can create. But the growing part have to be organic to get the product organically grown plants, right? So, it's not that, it's misleading some points, yeah.
- Yeah, that makes sense. Well, we're gonna take our final break, Sma. And when we get back we're gonna go into your predictions for the future of cannabis tissue culture. When we think about packaging the literal elephant in the room is the Precision Batcher by Green Vault Systems. This machine allows you to cut down on the over packing and the product loss that might be associated with hand packing, right? And that's really where the savings is broken down. Using their ROI calculator, let's say it's 20 bucks an hour. It's $3 per gram, and it's 100 pounds per week. On an annual basis you're gonna be spending $360,000 with the Precision Batcher. That is your initial investment, your labor cost, your product yield. That is compared to $726,000 that you're spending on hand packing. It definitely makes a whole lot of sense to use the Green Vault Systems products. And also, they have a really cool patent. It's called Air Kush Technology. And it moves all the buds through gentle puffs of air. So there's very little trichome loss. I know sometimes that's an argument of some of these machines. Hey, there's so much trichome loss. We don't want to use them. But with this new technology, the Air Kush Technology, it's actually being pushed throughout the system with air, so it's not hitting the sides of the machine. You work really hard to grow your amazing flower, so you should treat it as such all the way through the end of the packaging experience. All right, we're back from our final break. And I want to hear about the future of tissue culture in the cannabis space and your predictions.
- Starting, like, if I go back to a year, we saw that cannabis growers are resistant to tissue culture. But coming in only in a year in this area we are supplying the tissue culture product to our clients. So far we have, I believe, about 30 licensed producers signed agreement with Segra for getting the service in Canada. And I know in California I would say top 10 growers are using tissue culture already to produce their plants. They started using heavily the tissue culture products from their sites. So I can see a huge growth of tissue culture coming. And eventually, most of these licensed producers will grow through tissue culture, right? So, that I can see. And not only Segra, there will be several tissue culture companies will be required for supplying these big demands of tissue culture products. So, yeah, I predict that it will be a huge market for tissue culture. And once legalization coming in the US, you can see a big burst of product coming from tissue culture, product coming from Canada, or Europe, or Mexico, or everywhere. It will be easily supplied. For agriculture industry in Canada we have a company we supply throughout US and Canada, US and Europe, and everywhere. So, same thing happening in cannabis industry very soon.
- Okay, and I had a pretty incredible interview, enlightening interview with Nat Pennington. I'm not sure if you've ever done work with him. He's the founder of Humboldt Seed Company. And it was great to learn about his company. He's been around for 20 years. And I'm curious, you know, in your opinion, what's gonna happen with the seed companies like Nat? Are they still gonna be able to distribute seeds to both commercial growers and hobbyists? Are they going to trend more to the hobbyists that have the lower plant count that might not be using tissue culture? You know, kind of what's Sma's crystal ball prediction for the future of seed companies?
- That question I have to answer very carefully this one. Let's put it this way. Yeah, seeds, as I mentioned in agriculture industry, seeds are still there. Seed companies are still producing lots of seeds. And they're marketing, and they're growing. Tissue culture is growing day by day still, right? So there is a market saturation will come parallelly with seeds and the tissue culture side, right? But if you see that one day tissue culture products versus seeds, again, I'm telling you that a true to type production is possible through tissue culture, virus elimination, and all of these advantages I mentioned through tissue culture. So, what is the market share, hard to say, who will take more, and which less, right? Again, there is because of convenience or easy to transport, maybe outdoor people, some of those will go for seeds. And some of these will stay with tissue culture. But indoor all will be because it's easier, they don't have to wait for a generation. If you have really good plants coming convenience. And then you just start, and grow, and save some time for indoor growers. So, you're getting the plants. You are there, you start veg right away. So, while you're wasting time to germinate, and then grow, and then get them to the stage of veg state, right? So, we believe long-term there may be a better quality seed coming in the market. And they will take their position at some point. But like agriculture industry, seed tissue culture make their own place in the market. Outdoor, again, predominantly probably seed based, indoor probably predominantly tissue culture based. We don't know, right? And depends on cultivar also. Some cultivars probably not do good with seeds, so they have to depend on the tissue culture. Same as agriculture industry. Some varieties you can not do anything with the seeds. They take longer time, require some kind of treatment to germinate. Whereas in tissue culture is you just grow from cuttings and these things, right? It's hard to predict right now. But I can see a huge market for tissue culture is coming. That's true.
- Yeah. And do you see a future where seed companies like Nat and Humboldt Seed Company, do you think they might start creating their own internal tissue culture laboratories? I mean, that could be a potential. Or does Segra, if you're allowed to talk about kind of strategic partnerships and supply chain partnerships, do you see a future where Segra might partner with some of the more reputable and well-known seed companies that have exclusive genetics? Could you see yourself kind of partnering with them?
- Yeah, we can see, actually, without naming we've already started negotiating. We got the connection with some seed companies that have the new cultivars breeding. So, you do the breeding, you have to come through the seeds, produce a new plant. So, seeds, requirement for that is always there. And we'll have that access to those new cultivars. And we bring these, germinate. And then we do a scale up of that, right? So, that's possible, collaboration has already started happening. Same as in the retail industry. Most of the tissue culture companies connected all have their own breeding team, or have connected with a breeding lab or a breeding company, where you get the new variety coming, new cultivar coming. They have the access to do the marketing, yes. The tissue culture have to be involved there to multiply and give them to the clients as early as possible. So, there's always a collaboration between breeding, seed companies, and tissue culture companies. And I can see that it's happening very soon and in this industry also.
- That's great. I mean, from this masterclass today, you know, to me personally it sounds like we're going to have more affordable, healthier, cleaner, and probably more varieties of cannabis in the future with tissue culture and the help of all the research that you're doing. So that's super exciting to me as a consumer. And I'd love to kind of wrap up with your horizon of future expansion, projects, anything fun that you can share with me today at Segra that maybe, you know, it's not out yet, but you're working on it behind the scenes, and you can share a little bit with us today.
- I can say one, or I can mention one thing. As I mentioned, we have a real interest, I have real interest on automation of the procedure for the tissue culture process. So, we are currently working with automation of different steps of tissue culture. For example, we have already automated the cleaning and sanitization process for culture vessels. So you don't require any human labor or minimize the human labor, let's put it this way. Media preparation and dispensing. Already in a Segra facility we already introduced. Very close to automate the test tube cleaning procedures, which require manual labor, a lot. And sanitation process, that's one. This is all achieved through the collaboration work between Segra tissue culture lab and engineering department of Simon Fraser University here in Vancouver area. We are also in the process of developing a robotic system to do the transplanting in the laminar flow, where you have all the technicians sitting and splitting the plants. That part is also possible to automate. Some of this background work I did. I had a publication and a patent there. So, we are trying to implement that one at larger scale in cannabis industry. All of these, the reason I'm mentioning, as you mentioned, that price and market. So, tissue culture, the most of these expenses coming from labor, right? So, by automating some of these processes we can minimize our costs. We can minimize. We have more competition in the market. So we will be ahead of our competitors. Plus, we bring prices down so close that we can actually provide the cutting plants or close to the seed plants, okay? Then, they'll see that the price is not a big difference. Why not do the tissues culture, right? There's the idea. So, that's one thing which is going on heavily in my R and D side. And Segra actually doing pretty good job in here with collaborating with Simon Fraser University. And we are developing different products in this sector.
- That's excellent. And I should have covered this, Sma, at the very beginning. But could you give me kind of the high level of your different tissue culture patents. And I'll make sure to link them in the description of this episode as well.
- Yeah, definitely. So, patents, I had one bioreactor which I developed. Let me go back to the bioreactor. What a bioreactor is growing plants in liquid media, compared with solid media. Right now most of the 99%, 99.5% probably tissue culture companies using the solid media, where you're producing gel. And you inoculate the plants there. But liquid culture has found some advantages over solid media, most importantly the labor. In solid media you have to prepare the cuttings technician receipt and inoculate each one by using some tools. Whereas, the liquid media you just finished the cutting. You dump everything inside the vessel. And close it and leave it there, right? Only problem is that you have to make sure that enough oxygen is in the liquids. There's the critical part there. That is one of the patents is there. Automation part, as I mentioned, this is pending. Right now, in my previous job we did some automation process for the tissue culture product doing robotic system doing the tissue culture product in the laminar flow system. While working the last few years in Segra International I have two patents. We did some work there. One is we call it stage 3.5 product, where you escape the stage three, and you don't go to stage four. We're doing in-between from stage two directly down to 3.5? So, escape actually one step. It's a combination of both steps. And the vessel is designed to grow the plant, stage 2.5 we call it. And, also, ship it in the Canadian market. That way, the design, like, you grow the plants, but you ship it that way, not in the shipping time shocking. And it's not killing the plants, it's not damaging the plants. That way it had been designed that you can actually grow and ship in the same vessels.
- That is incredible!
- And the customer, yeah, receives those, right? So, that's the one. Another one is auto flower, tissue culture auto flower. That's also recently applied for a patent. There is the research recently done. Yeah, that's a few patents. Some is in process, some has already got patented. So, it's in process right now, a few of those.
- Excellent, well, thank you so much for joining me and everyone listening today for this masterclass on tissue culture. I really appreciate your time. And I know everyone in the community is gonna want to reach out to you. So what's the best way for people to get in touch with you? Do you like email, LinkedIn, what's the best?
- Both ways works, email, LinkedIn. Yeah, both, either way I can be in touch, yeah.
- Great, well, I'll go ahead and link those in the description. Thank you again for joining us today. Is there anything else that maybe we missed that you'd like to cover?
- No, I can just mention about Segra current growth expansion, what we are doing. Currently, we are developing the Canadian market definitely. We are developing the international market. We already started shipping. I think we are the first Canadian tissue culture company who started exporting to the international market, cannabis tissue company. We already legally export a few of these plants in South Africa. And another one is coming in Germany, that kind of work. We are working on it. We are also investing in R and D for tissue culture and molecular biology lab, which will help to maintain the market leadership position for Segra. And again, I mentioned, before 2021 is also an entry for Segra to the US market.
- I bet, well, thank you for sharing that. I'll also include the website for you guys. So, for any growers listening out there that want to learn how to work with you guys I'll include that. So, thank you again, and looking forward to seeing you guys grow.
- Thank you very much.
- [Nick] Thanks for tuning into the episode today. We have all of our shows on the brand new cannacribs.org website. You can of course watch it on our YouTube. And if you're tuning into the podcast we are on Spotify, Apple, Google, and everywhere you like to listen to your podcasts. Thanks to Lise and her team at Green Vault Systems for making this episode possible. And if you are an Instagram fan check us out, @cannacribs. And our second account Growers Network. See you on the next interview.