Jamaican Lion is a "Type II" cannabis chemovar rich in genetic background that produces both cannabidiol (CBD) and tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Jamaican Lion was used to create the industry's first reference quality genome assembly.
The industry's most comprehensive Cannabis reference genome
Medicinal Genomics Corporation (MGC), a pioneer in using genomics to improve the transparency, safety and yield of cannabis has today announced the industry’s most comprehensive Cannabis reference genome, a high quality de novo genome assembly of the Jamaican Lion cannabis strain. As the first reference genome to break “usability barrier,” the significance of this development cannot be overstated. Having a comprehensive cannabis genome opens the door to a host of industry innovations, including enabling cannabis research in states and countries where cannabis is still illegal, marker-assisted selection (MAS) for genetically-based strain identification, accelerated breeding to improve production yields, reliable seed-to-sale tracking systems, and pathogen identification to ensure cannabis purity and safety.
Read more here: https://www.medicinalgenomics.com/jamaican-lion-cannabis-genome/
How we got here
In 2018, Medicinal Genomics began a project to create the most complete cannabis reference genome. The team “shotgun sequenced and assembled a Cannabis trio of the Jamaican Lion cultivar (sibling pair and their offspring)” using the Pacific Bioscience Sequel II platform. This resulted in the most contiguous Cannabis sativa assemblies to date. Read more here: https://www.medicinalgenomics.com/breakthrough-cannabis-genomics-study/
Why Jamaican Lion?
There are not a lot of strains that produce both CBD and THC. Jamaican Lion is one that does. It is also a well known and well documented strain. When we create a fully assembled cannabis reference genome that we want to see adopted as the standard cannabis reference sequence in the scientific community we want it to have the two most important genes in the assembly like Jamaican Lion does. For similar reasons, we also made sure there is a male plant in the trio (Mother/Daughter/Father) so that we have the Y-chromosome in our Father assembly. The willingness of the grower to work with us to source all of these strains was also key in our development of the genome assembly.
Jamaican Lion on Kannapedia®
Cultivars, strains, chemovars (whatever you love to call them) that were sequenced with our StrainSEEK® Version 2 technology have been mapped to the new Jamaican Lion reference and their reports have been updated on Kannapedia.net.
StrainSEEK® customers who visit their report pages will find a new data visualization showing Bt:Bd allele coverage, changes to the Genetic Relatives and Most Genetically Distant Strains tables, new VCF files, and a new blockchain registration.
To create the Jamaican Lion assembly, over 180 billion bases were sequenced with Pacific Biosciences latest Version 6 Chemistry, allowing us to select reads that average 60,000 base pairs in length with 15x coverage. This is an order of magnitude more contiguous than anything produced to date, making it the first reference genome to break “usability barrier”. Having a comprehensive cannabis genome opens the door to a host of industry innovations, including marker-assisted breeding and seed-to-sale tracking systems.
Read more on our blog post here: https://www.medicinalgenomics.com/strainseek-samples-mapped-jamaican-lion/