Matt Plavan, President of Arcadia Specialty Genomics
Chapters:
00:00 What happened with the GM products?
05:01 Does this mean the anti-science crowd won?
10:00 What is Good Wheat(TM)?
16:24 Cannabis missed the Green Revolution
21:39 250 cannabinoids
26:16 Is there regulatory progress?
Today we're joined by Matt Plavan, President of Arcadia Specialty Genomics.
The last time we talked with someone from Arcadia Bioscience, a biotech company working on plant genomics in Davis, California, they were confronting GMO regulatory hurdles.
Which was a pity. They had created these great new strains of rice and soybeans, among other crops, that were being held from market due to regulations in Southeast Asia. This at a time when world population is . . . well, you know what its doing.
That was then. Today Arcadia has pivoted to some new crops with some new technology. They have developed a new fiber rich wheat called GoodWheat(TM) that is also lower in gluten and thus matches our modern diets. (And as the author can attest, it's quite tasty in pasta.) The other cool thing about this wheat is that it is not GM according to most regulatory agencies.
Developed with a technology called “tilling,” the wheat is considered “gene-edited” but not genetically modified and therefore not regulated by most countries. For example, see the ruling made by Australia in the last month.
The company has also set up a division to improve the cannabis seed which, because of its illegality, was bypassed by the two crop revolutions of the past fifty years. You might be familiar with THC and CBD, two main cannabinoids in the plant. But did you know there are 250 such cannabinoids that might prove . . . well, interesting?
