Hacker News Reader

Comment by dumbfoundded | Hacker News Reader

As someone in this industry, I doubt this will become a reality. The real problem is cost. When you use yeast, you have to supply the energy for the entire system. When you grow a plant, you get free energy from the sun. The cost savings are hard to beat. Nicotine extracts aren't made from yeast either. That should be a big warning flag for the business sides of these cool projects.

View on HN

> When you use yeast, you have to supply the energy for the entire system

The “entire system” is a vat with yeast in it. For starters, that’s a much more space efficient way of growing something than in plants.

Secondly, the energy you provide to the system, in brewing, is just sugar, which is incredibly cheap. In fact, given that this works well, at large scale, for beer brewing (i.e. ethanol production), why do you think it wouldn’t work well for THC production? In fact, energy consumption in commercial (especially illicit) cannabis production is a nontrivial cost factor.

How does yeast get amino acids? How does it get nitrogen for that matter? Doesn’t it need those to grow?

Seems like we just give it sugar.

The THC molecule is made from carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, and it seems to be true for all cannabinoids. So if we can extract the cannabinoids but leave the rest of the organic compounds (big "if", I know), one could theoretically recycle the other required nutrients. In which case a steady supply of sugar might indeed be enough for the most part.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrahydrocannabinol

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabinoid

minimal media is sugar + some salts that provide Nitrogen and a few other essentials.

You’re right. The parent comment focussed specifically on energy, so I did as well. But obviously both cannabis plants and yeast need other nutrients. That said, a minimal yeast broth is extremely simple.

> For starters, that’s a much more space efficient way of growing something than in plants.

You have to account for the land use by the sugarcane (no idea how things would net out).

My understanding of illicit cannabis production is only from films like "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" but it seems to be heat lamps in basements and caravans etc.

And the impression the news gives me is that UK Police regularly use heat cameras from helicopters and analysis of electricity bills to find illegal growers.

Would this approach allow test-tube illegal cultivation with a much less detectable footprint?

I was thinking this’ll take prison hooch to the next level

This is somewhat outdated, LEDs are now powerful enough and emit much less heat.

Roughly 1/3 of cannabis is grown inside [1], primarily for reasons of quality control. I'd actually expect this number to grow as the legal market expands and tighter control is needed to keep up with regulations. Which is to say that I'm sure there's a market for this.

[1] https://sweatingthebigstuff.com/percentage-medical-cannabis-...

Making compounds with GM yeast tends to be a lot more efficient than growing whatever the original gene came from because the modified yeast tends to dedicate a lot more of its output to making whatever you've spliced in.

I'm no expert in this, but I wouldn't be surprised if the energy costs could be outweighed by less land use and less labor.

Labor required in cannabis is almost negligible. You just need labor to harvest it!

Land is pretty cheap. The kind of stuff used in manufacturing is what they call biomass. Basically they just chop down and grind the whole plant with a tractor. Planting will get automated too. Plant genetics are also improving.

The result is that the cost of hemp/cannabis is rapidly dropping. These new startups will have to surpass a moving target. I'm not saying it's impossible but I doubt it.

Two years back they synthesized the both halves of the steps for creating morphine using yeast.

If you feed the yeast sugar, which is made from sunlight it will be worth it if the yields are high enough.

Yeah but then you're growing and refining a plant to avoid growing and refining a plant.

The article said it needs to improve 100x. I'm not sure if that's reflective of today's or future prices as they continue to rapidly drop.

It's certainly not impossible. I think it's just unlikely given the similarity between the tobacco and cannabis industries from a supply chain perspective.

Yes but at this point sugar is far more industrialized than cannabis. Sugar is ~$.15/lb wholesale (or less).

Which is meaningless unless we know how much sugar is required to produce a given dollar value of usable THC etc molecules.

Additionally, cannabis tends to be extraordinarily easy to grow, and THC extraordinarily easy to extract.

Cannabis already is grown at industrial scale, all that’s missing is a few large scale certified extraction facilities.

Tasmanian Alkaloids, the worlds largest supplier of thebaine, may well be ready to scale up rapidly.[1]

1. https://www.examiner.com.au/story/5150473/tas-alks-considers...

>Which is meaningless unless we know how much sugar is required to produce a given dollar value of usable THC etc molecules.

Which we can already guesstimate to be not that much.

>As someone in this industry, I doubt this will become a reality. The real problem is cost. When you use yeast, you have to supply the energy for the entire system. When you grow a plant, you get free energy from the sun. The cost savings are hard to beat.

It's not like beer or cheese has a profit problem...

So this accidentally made me go down a speculative rabbit hole... Cannabis is apparently a C3 plant[0]. It's also not a perennial. So while you have a point, there is still room for improving efficiency. I tried looking up what the current status with genetically modifying plants with high photosynthetic efficiency was. First thing I found was... tobacco[1]. Yeah, that's not all that useful.

More generally, I wonder if there might be some kind of "holy grail" easy-to-grow, easy to genetically modify plant out there that could be a perfect template for photosynthetic production of all kinds of organic compounds. I know people have been trying to modify algea and cyanobacteria to make synthetic biofuels directly for ages, for example. Sadly the Wiki page on photosynthetic efficiency remains fairly superficial[2], and the C3, C4 and CAM pathway articles, while a tempting rabbit hole, don't seem to help much either[3][4][5].

Also, we all know monocrop farming is not going to be sustainable: the simplicity of it makes it easier to "optimize" for farming machines, but at the cost of soil degradation, while also being more prone to diseases and weather disasters. Plus, with current improvements in automation the optimization advantage is shrinking rapidly. Could agroforestry, like the kind advocated by Geoff Lawton[6] or Willie Smits[7][8][9] be combined with this? The benefit/problem with agroforestry is that it has many different kinds of complex yields. All useful, but perhaps not so flexible. However, Smits suggests an economy based on the sugar palm as a source of bioethanol:

> And Smits said that he discovered that because of the [black sugar palm]'s special leaf structure, its year-round production and extremely efficient photosynthesis, the yield of ethanol from the sugar palm was far greater than the biofuel output from other feedstocks in use around the world. Smits says that his process can produce 19 tons (6,300 gallons/24,000 liters) of ethanol per hectare annually. That's a staggering output-to-land area ratio compared to corn, the favored ethanol crop of the United States, at 3.3 tons (1,100 gallons/4,200 liters) per hectare, by most recent U.S. Department of Agriculture yield figures. It also far outshines Brazil's sugarcane; output was assumed to be 4.5 tons (1,500 gallons/5,700 liters) per hectare in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's recent lifecycle analysis of renewable fuels. [A hectare is 2.5 acres.]

Keep in mind that once a tree has grown it requires less energy and material to maintain. Non-perennial plants have to grow every year, which comes with large energy and material overheads (both from the plants itself and from the labour involved). That makes the claim more plausable. (Cool little tangent: looking for more information on this Arenga Pinnata the first thing I came across was its listing as an invasive species on BioNET-EAFRINET, a knowledge database run by Kenyan and Ugandan research institutes[10]. This is the kind of work that never reaches the Western media, and I would guess it's partially because it does not fit our existing narrative biases that are still very much stuck in colonial times)

Now, bioethanol is a fuel source for cars, but sugar is a fuel source for living things. So why not use that as a form of "energy currency" for biohacking? It would have the benefit of increased flexibility. Imagine having a food forest centered around sugar palms, like Smits suggests, with a few genetic modifications for even higher energy yields, and with a lab nearby that can grow the more complex organic compounds with simpler but easier to genetically modify life-forms, like yeast. The sugar palm provides a steady source of biofuel, while the yeast (or whatever) being cultivated can be changed quickly to meet shifting market demands.

Anyway, this is all just speculation, and perhaps the losses of energy involved are so great it would not work out. OTOH, going the agroforestry route yields so many other integrated benefits like local climate control, CO2 sinks and a fresh water supply in the groundwater that I expect it will be a net win when viewed holistically.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/botany/comments/63ybgx/c3_and_c4_pl...

[1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6422/eaat9077

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C3_carbon_fixation

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_carbon_fixation

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crassulacean_acid_metabolism

[6] https://www.discoverpermaculture.com/video-1-pdc-2019

[7] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2011/06/1106...

[8] https://vimeo.com/8724530

[9] https://www.ted.com/talks/willie_smits_restores_a_rainforest...

[10] https://keys.lucidcentral.org/keys/v3/eafrinet/weeds/key/wee...

By the way, as always it turns out that things are not so simple as just adding a more efficient photosynthesis pathway to a life-form and everything will be better. There are complex trade-offs between the different photosynthesis pathways, and some results are counter-intuitive. Despite having evolved independently multiple times, practically no tree species with the C4 pathway seem to have evolved: only "grasses, herbs, bushes and shrubberies"[0]. According to the summary on Wikipedia[1], C4 has an advantage in high temperatures and low rainfall environments, and needs more sunlight. Furthermore, as a linked article on the researchgate discussion[3] mentions:

> While growth and photosynthetic potentials are typically less in the woody species relative to the C4 plants, the woody seedlings often tolerate low light within the C4 canopy, and will steadily grow until they overtop the C4 plants, unless they are reduced or killed by an episodic disturbance (Bond and Midgley, 2000; Wedin, 2004; Bond, 2008)

So there is a reason the trees win in the long-run if left undisturbed, and that could mean that adding C4 to other plants isn't a panacea as it is less robust under poor sunlight conditions. And in another article[3] comparing a C3 tree with one of the few known C4 trees:

> The results show that the carbon-gaining capacity of E. forbesii is comparable to that of a C3 species in a moderately cool, shaded forest environment. There appears to be no particular advantage or disadvantage associated with the C4 photosynthetic pathway of E. forbesii in this environment.

Perhaps most disturbing is this opening sentence in the abstract of a paper from 2006:

> Plants with the C4 photosynthetic pathway dominate today's tropical savannahs and grasslands, and account for some 30% of global terrestrial carbon fixation. Their success stems from a physiological CO2-concentrating pump, which leads to high photosynthetic efficiency in warm climates and low atmospheric CO2 concentrations.

Since "low atmospheric CO2 concentrations" are not exactly our biggest concern at the moment, does C4 actually help then?

So as always, improving on nature is complicated.

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/post/Do_trees_with_C4_photosynt...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_photosynthesis#Wh...

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Arvind_Singh56/post/Do_...

[3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00384538

[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1626541/

Given that tobacco is also a C3 plant your link to the post about improving tobacco photosynthesis by reducing the cost of photorespiration is exactly the mechanism I expect to be exploited by any scientist/company seeking to improve C3 photosynthesis.

This work is based around is tobacco because it is an excellent model crop for transformation and in situ agricultural studies. Not because this lab is explicitly seeking to improve tobacco.

This work is probably the most impressive improvements made to the science of practically improving photosynthesis.

It was published by one of the best labs in the best department for the study of photosynthesis in the world.

* http://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6422/eaat9077 * Ort lab http://www.life.illinois.edu/ort/OrtCV.html * Ripe Study https://ripe.illinois.edu/

I apologize for being too negative about the tobacco, you are absolutely right. The paper concludes that it is hopeful for improving grain crop yields:

> We are optimistic that similar gains may be achieved and translated into increased yield in C3 grain crops because photorespiration is common to all C3 plants and higher photosynthetic rates under elevated CO2, which suppresses photorespiration and increases harvestable yield in C3 crops.

However, does not refute the other papers I have linked about C3/C4/CAM photosynthesis that suggest that C4 may not be universally beneficial, but an optimization in certain contexts only. I do hope enhancements to plants in agroforestry settings, or restorative agricultural practices in general, are also possible. Those are badly needed if we want to regenerate topsoil and perhaps even make food production a net carbon-sink.

If somebody will pay for it, someone else will make it. And there are plenty of people who will buy weed beer.

> Nicotine extracts

They are not extracts. The nicotine in vape juice is 100% synthetic.

That depends; some actually do use natural nicotine (especially those made by tobacco companies, for obvious reasons).

You are clearly not in the brewing industry. Pot gorwes could olnly dream of this level of efficiency.

How much is grown in actual sunlight? Isnt most all of it in greenhouses under lamps?

Mixed lighting greenhouses are common because you have a better final product, more control over the environment, and less risk of contamination from nearby farms that are using banned pesticides. There is still quite a bit of sungrown but it requires the right climate. Typically sungrown is only suitable for manufactured products.

As it becomes more regulated, I personally see this as less of an issue for quality.

That being said, growing with yeast is only good for manufactured products.

A lot of the market is shifting over to outdoor. Quality is slightly worse but so much cheaper.

If you're talking about manufactured products that the yeast would compete with, it's pretty much all outdoor.

What would be some good (economically viable) applications of this tech?

I'm not sure. I'd produce something you cannot grow with a plant that grows so easily they call it weed. I think it's a cool technology, they just chose an interesting target b/c of the hype about the industry.

That only holds true for the legal market though?

Depends, greenhouses are pretty common too, but yes, in general, you wouldn't want someone seeing what you're growing. I find it unlikely though that these funded startups are targeting the underground market.

You can't grow yeast with sunlight?

Yeast doesn't photosynthesize. You can use solar power, but then you have big capital costs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com