True Cut Perspectives

The cannabis industry is expanding rapidly, with new cultivars entering the market at an unprecedented pace. As breeders, cultivators, and consumers attempt to navigate this growing landscape, one issue remains unresolved: there is no standardized system for verifying cultivar identity. Genetics provides a path forward. Establishing a consistent, science-based approach to cultivar identification is essential for reducing confusion, improving transparency, and supporting a mor

Cannabis has evolved from a simple plant to a complex industry, with genetics playing a crucial role in its development. As the demand for cannabis products grows, understanding the genetic makeup of cannabis strains becomes increasingly important. True Cut Technology is at the forefront of this evolution, offering insights that can revolutionize how we cultivate and utilize cannabis. In this post, we will explore the intricacies of cannabis genetics, the significance of True

By Chad Ternes PhD I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Ripping off a strain name is easy. Ripping off a DNA sequence is not. That distinction matters more than most people realize, especially when disputes over cannabis genetics move from the market into the courtroom. Because once you’re in litigation, the rules change. Judges don’t care about your reputation in the industry. They don’t care how long you’ve been breeding, how well-known your cut is, or how many peopl

By Chad Ternes PhD Whole genome sequencing (WGS) is a powerful approach. There’s no question about that. The cannabis genome is large, roughly 800 megabases, or around 800 million base pairs depending on the variety. WGS attempts to read all of it. That level of coverage is genuinely necessary for certain applications. If you are assembling a reference genome from scratch, detecting structural variants, or characterizing novel variation in an uncharacterized population, you n

By Chad Ternes PhD There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding around somatic mutations and what they mean for SNP-based genetic fingerprints. Somatic mutations do occur. That’s well established. But their existence doesn’t undermine the utility of SNP fingerprints. What matters is scale, density, and how these systems are actually constructed and used. SNP-based fingerprints derived from RADseq or GBS approaches are already the standard for cultivar identification and i

By Chad Ternes PhD “Genetic fingerprinting” gets used as if it refers to a single, unified concept. It doesn’t. The same term is used to describe different applications that rely on similar tools, sometimes even the same markers. But they are answering fundamentally different questions. When those distinctions get blurred, it leads to confusion about what genetic data can and cannot tell you. At a high level, there are two major contexts where fingerprinting shows up: breedin

By Chad Ternes, PhD There’s a common idea that comes up in cannabis genetics: we need reference standards. A set of known, verified cultivars that everything else can be compared against. In theory, that would be ideal. In practice, we’re likely too far past that point for most cannabis strains. This is especially true if we’re talking about legacy or “OG” type cultivars. If someone out there is sitting on a perfectly preserved, well-documented seed bank from decades ago, I’d

By Chad Ternes PhD Let’s be honest. The US patent system was never designed for cannabis. And trying to force cannabis into that system may not be the right approach. For a long time, I approached cannabis from a purely biological perspective. It’s a plant. It should be treated like other agricultural crops. In many ways, that’s true. But cannabis doesn’t exist only as a biological system. Its history and culture tell a different story. Cannabis has shaped human society for c

by Anna Schwabe PhD Cannabis is now a global commercial crop, but it still lacks something most other agricultural systems take for granted: a shared, reliable way to verify cultivar identity. Breeders develop and release genetics into the market, cultivators propagate and scale them, and consumers purchase products based on strain names. Yet there is no standardized, affordable infrastructure that anchors those names to stable genetic records. True Cut was built to address t

Cannabis cultivation has evolved rapidly, transitioning from informal systems to a regulated and commercialized industry. As demand increases, so does the need for consistency, transparency, and accountability in how products are produced and labeled. Genetic verification is central to that shift. It provides a way to confirm that the plants being grown and sold correspond to a defined, consistent genetic identity rather than relying on names, assumptions, or variable chemi