Scientists brew cannabis using modified beer yeast

The latest study is the first that has “put it all together and shown that it actually works inside one cell, which is cool”, says Kevin Chen, chief executive of Hyasynth Bio in Montreal, Canada, one of at least ten companies working to produce cannabinoids in engineered yeast, bacteria or algae. But those yields would need to increase by at least 100-fold for the cost to be competitive with plant-extracted cannabinoids, says Jason Poulos, chief executive of Librede, a company in Carlsbad, California, that holds the first patent on a process for making cannabinoids from sugars in yeast. Scientists at Demetrix, a company formed by Keasling in 2015 to work on this problem, have already boosted the cannabinoid yield of this process by several orders of magnitude, says Jeff Ubersax, chief executive of the firm in Emeryville, California.

Source: www.nature.com