What is Tissue Culture, Genetic Resets and Breeder Rights Explained ft. Kristian Andreassen

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Kristian Andreassen: Which is really important to me as a cultivator, because you're not manipulating the plant — you're not pruning or topping the plant. I actually saw something like a 30% reduction in the time of my veg cycle. Bryan Fields: What's up, guys? Welcome back to another episode of The Dime. I'm Bryan Fields, and with me as always is Kellen Finney. This week we've got a very special guest, Kristian Andreassen of Conception Nurseries. Kristian, thanks for taking the time — how are you doing today? Kristian Andreassen: Doing great, thanks for having me. Excited to be here. Kellen Finney: Kristian, how are you doing? Doing really well, really excited to talk about tissue culture and cultivation and all these fun topics, especially because a lot of this was spearheaded on the West Coast, and I believe you're on the West Coast right now, so it's nice to continue the West Coast vibes. Bryan Fields: Yeah, I'm stoked. I think we've got a lot of fun topics to talk about, some that I'm excited to learn about because I'm really unfamiliar with them. Before we dive in, I think it's important to note — Kristian might be physically located on the West Coast, but where your heart is is usually where you were born, and that tends to make people feel a little stronger one way or the other. So, East Coast versus West Coast — which way are you going? Kristian Andreassen: Go Yankees. Bryan Fields: Jeez, okay — that's enough, that's enough. Maybe that's the question for another day. Before we dive in, Kristian, can you give our listeners a little background about yourself and how you found your way into the cannabis space? Kristian Andreassen: It actually started in high school — we used to always try to smoke for free, buy half-pounds, sell a couple eighths, and smoke for free. We moved a little bit of weight back in New York too. We had a connection to some tribal land, some of the Indian reservations, where product would come down from Canada, and we'd pick it up and take it to New York City to flip it real quick. So it started for me around high school, a little after. I ended up moving out west for college — this was around 2000 — and a friend's brother had a house off campus. We'd go over there a lot, and I kept hearing these humming fans and I was like, "What is that? What's going on in your house?" It took a while until I earned their trust, and then one day they showed me upstairs — there was a little bedroom converted into a small four-light grow. I remember thinking, "Oh my God, the cops are coming, this is crazy, you guys are growing weed in here." This was before I really knew about Prop 215 and stuff like that. I spent about 22, 23 years in the Lake Tahoe area, where a lot of people supplemented their income that way, and I was writing software at the time, had some free time, had friends getting into it, and just always felt a draw to the plant. It started with a couple lights in a garage, and every year it got bigger — more rental properties, and ultimately greenhouses and buying properties. It kind of snowballed from there. Bryan Fields: Love it. So give us the high-level overview of Conception Nurseries and how you found your way into working with them. Kristian Andreassen: Conception Nurseries is the only gen-zero tissue culture nursery in California right now — might be in the nation too. It's funny, I had this cut — the original Girl Scout Cookies "Denver Mint" cut — and I got it before the rest of the market did, through some good connections in Mendocino. I ran it for years, and during that time the plant started doing funny things — it started to self-pollinate, it lost its vigor, it lost its checks, it just started losing everything. I started doing research — back then you couldn't really Google stuff, you'd talk on message boards — and this was probably ten, twelve, maybe more years ago. I came across posts talking about tissue culture, and there was a hydro store in Santa Rosa selling tissue culture kits. I bought one — they said it was the only way to really reset the genetics, get it back to what it was before whatever happened along the way. I took two or three hundred cuts, put them into tissue culture, and failed miserably — I was doing this in a garage, and you can't do that in a garage, it's got to be a sterile lab environment. But it piqued my interest. I'm a geek at heart — I studied computer science — and it was funny, my first ever grow I hit it out of the park, over two pounds a light, when people were doing three-quarters of a pound. I thought, "This is easy, inputs and outputs, I have an engineering background, I can do this." The next round was half a pound a light doing the exact same stuff. I learned quick that genetics matter — if you're growing something everyone else has, it's not going to get you the best result. So keeping genetics clean and at peak performance became imperative. Fast forward a couple years, I was part of another company that was probably the first to bring tissue culture to cannabis commercially at scale, and had a partner who tragically passed away. I found myself at a crossroads, trying to figure out what I wanted to do professionally — the breeding, the selection, the pheno hunting, that's really where my passion was. At the same time the industry took a downturn, and I took a couple steps back to take a step forward. Kevin, the CEO at Conception, was one of our first clients, and he reached out saying they really needed someone to run product development and help the breeders. He pitched me the whole concept he was trying to launch around breeders' rights — that no one was paying breeders for their work. We saw eye to eye, so I joined and helped develop the menu and the relationships with breeders. Tissue culture is unique because you're betting on where a very volatile industry is going to be a year or a year and a half from now — when you take a strain and put it into culture to clean it up and ramp it up for commercial production, we're talking hundreds of thousands of cuts a month, and that takes at least a year, usually twelve to fifteen months. Kellen Finney: Can you explain real quick what tissue culture actually is, in case someone's unfamiliar? Kristian Andreassen: Tissue culture has been used in traditional agriculture for over 50 years. It's a sterile lab environment — you take a cutting of the plant, specifically the meristem, the very, very tiny tip of the newest growth, usually at the apical top of the plant. We take that because it isn't yet connected to the vascular system — kind of like getting a virus on your computer, anything that's happened to the plant lives in the vascular system, so before that system forms, we take the newest growth, which hasn't been affected by anything in the plant's past. We put it into a test tube in a sterile lab environment and rebuild the plant from that newest tissue. You can think of it like taking cuttings off mother plants, like most cultivators have done, except instead of a mother plant, these live in test tubes in an agar gel, grown vertically, and then cut from that. It's important because it keeps the juvenility — it resets the genetics back to what they were like when the plant was a seed. It's similar to a stem cell, in a way — the meristem has undifferentiated cells that can act like a stem cell. Kellen Finney: Never thought about it that way. Kristian Andreassen: Yeah, yeah, I never thought about it that way either, but it's a pretty similar concept. Kellen Finney: So it has access to all of the genetics again, and that's why it resets things — is that what's going on? Kristian Andreassen: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Kellen Finney: So with that reset, do you basically get a new immune system back? Is that what's so powerful about it? Why go through all that effort to pull an individual cell instead of just cutting and cloning? Kristian Andreassen: It's not easy, and that's what I've learned over the years — going from trying to do it in my garage to now running a sterile lab with over 200 employees, it's real bioscience. We're doing some cool stuff — we have a big presentation coming up at MJBizCon showing why the meristem is so important. We can show that bacteria and viruses accumulate in plant tissue over the years, and this process resets it back to almost 95 to 98 percent of what the plant was at the beginning. Even setting aside viruses, viroids, and bacteria, you're giving the plant its vigor back. A lot of people call it genetic drift — though I'd call it more "genetic swing" — where the actual DNA isn't necessarily changing, but you see less rooting, less vigor, which affects yield, THC percentage, smell, and so on. Going through tissue culture, especially gen-zero, you get a plant that grows like a seed — symmetrical branching, which matters a lot to me as a cultivator, because you're not manipulating the plant. I saw about a 30% reduction in veg time because I'm not topping it every time — every time you top a plant, it takes about a week to bounce back — and you're not pruning it into a bush shape. With gen-zero tissue culture, it just grows symmetrically. Bryan Fields: Is there additional risk with tissue culture, or is it actually less risky? Is it more costly? Where's the biggest dividing line for companies deciding to go one way or the other? Kristian Andreassen: There is some added cost. Since we're a nursery selling millions of plants a year to cultivators, that was one of the hardest things for a lot of cultivation groups to wrap their heads around — nobody propagates for themselves at scale, they go to nurseries to plant acres of entries. It is more expensive, and like I said, it takes twelve to fifteen months, but the benefits outweigh the cost. We've done white paper studies showing cultivators getting more yield — and unfortunately THC percentage is still a huge driver in this industry — and we're seeing bumps in both yield and THC percentage that cover the added cost, plus the plant's characteristics are far more consistent long term. Bryan Fields: The plant itself, and its characteristics, stay more consistent long term in those environments. Kristian Andreassen: Yep, yep. Kellen Finney: Does it work for every strain, or are there certain ones it doesn't work as well for? Kristian Andreassen: Every plant is different. I've had funny conversations with very smart PhD agronomists who look at this plant and say it's just like a tomato — it needs certain NPK ratios at certain times, that's it. I've grown with some of these people, and by the end of the process they come back and admit they had no idea about this plant. There's almost a symbiotic relationship with the soil and environmental variables that people can't fully replicate — people talk about terroir in the wine industry the same way. I think what we've done is essentially reboot the genetics for a lot of cultivators, including a lot of in-house strains people have built brands around. Unfortunately, each of these plants has its own unique recipe of hormones and nutrients it requires — you can't take one nutrient recipe and apply it across all these different varieties. Some plants go into culture and it takes eight months of R&D just to figure that out, so it can take two years for a plant to become commercially viable, because we have to develop a nutrient recipe that actually works for that specific cultivar. Bryan Fields: Is there a marker you use to understand which nutrients a plant is craving? I'd assume it would be so much easier if the plant could just tell you what it needs. Kristian Andreassen: We're looking at it on a genomic level now too. If we understand the lineage, we can say, "okay, this OG lineage tends to like this, or doesn't like that." We're getting good base formulations and making tweaks as new cultivars come in. It's also complicated because there are KPIs for each plant — how much it elongates, which determines how many cuttings we can take, a multiplication factor, a rooting factor — all of which we analyze. We also have a strong business intelligence side that tracks what it costs us to produce a given plant, and all of that factors into whether it's commercially viable. Often the plants in highest demand are the finicky ones, not the ones that put out four pounds a light, so there's a lot that goes into deciding if it's the right plant to pursue. Kellen Finney: Do you provide recommendations to clients — like, "hey, we found this strain does better transferred to rock wool versus soil"? And also, just a random question — once tissue culture is sitting in the gel with the plant and the roots, can you just pull it out when it's ready and put it straight into soil, or does it need to be cleaned off first? How does that work? Kristian Andreassen: To the first question — yes, for sure. There's a lot of bro-science floating around out there that makes me laugh, but yes, we absolutely do that. I've been selling plants to farmers for almost ten years now, and I still get the same people calling every year asking me to help plan their season. A nursery is a business built on trust — people are putting the money that supports their families on the line, so if you tell them the wrong thing to grow in the wrong situation, they can have a disastrous year. I've grown at scale for about a decade, and there was no book, no college course for this — you either learn quickly from your mistakes or you're gone, especially now that margins are slim. The nice thing about running a nursery is you build real relationships, and I still have people call me every season to help plan things out because I've earned that trust. As for the second question — no, you can't just pull it straight into soil. When the cutting is in tissue culture, it lives its life in a small agar gel while we push hormones for vertical growth, then cut it down — there's exponential growth, going from three plants to nine to twenty-seven, and so on, as you build stock to fulfill orders. From there, you induce a rooting hormone — that can be done right in the test tube, "in vitro" — and then you move the plant into a rooting substrate, whether that's rock wool, coco, or perlite, depending on what you're using. Some people take the bare root straight out and into soil or a soilless mix, but that's a lot more difficult and comes with much higher death rates — you might plant sixty and only half survive. For us, we bake them in an environment where humidity, temperature, and lighting are all perfect — we actually have a virtual tour link on our website; it's a pretty futuristic lab, honestly. Bryan Fields: Does anyone ever come to you and say, "I've got this idea for a cross," and want to use your team as a research lab to see how it plays out? Kristian Andreassen: Yeah, we're actually going through some of that right now in early stages. R&D is expensive, and a lot of people can't develop in-house strains — they don't have the time. So we're working with a group doing a lot of genomic trait mapping, trying to understand what's in the plant, and from there figuring out desired outcomes — whether that's boosting THC, boosting yield, or isolating a particular cannabinoid, since we're learning more about cannabinoids and terpenes every year. Kellen Finney: Could it be that specific — like, "I want this THC percentage, this terpene profile, and I want it to grow well in this region"? Kristian Andreassen: Yeah, absolutely — it's essentially marker-assisted breeding, where you identify a marker and try to express it more strongly in the offspring. We've identified certain markers for pathogen resistance, whether it's mold or bacteria common to certain regions, and we try to build stock that will do better in, say, New York versus California, where humidity and rainfall are completely different. Bryan Fields: Before, you mentioned gen-zero versus gen-one — can you explain the difference? Kristian Andreassen: Gen-zero means every plant comes directly out of the lab through micropropagation from a mother plant in a lab environment. Gen-one means the mother stock has been regenerated through tissue culture once, then taken out and grown in a nursery or indoor/greenhouse environment, and cuttings are taken off that mother repeatedly. It's a better start than a lot of nurseries have had historically, but you're still opening yourself up to pests and pathogen drift, because that gen-one label often becomes gen-fifty or gen-one-hundred once multiple cuts are taken off that same mother. HLVD is a big topic — I've seen people get decimated, losing 30 to 40 percent of their crop, because nurseries spread it around. Even with a tissue-cultured mother, once you're taking cuttings off her repeatedly, you're opening yourself up to those same problems, since things like HLVD can transmit through touch — you touch one plant, then another, and you've transferred it. If you're taking hundreds of thousands of cuts, it's going to propagate that way. With gen-zero, it's identical DNA, a clone, every single time; with gen-one, you're opening yourself up to pests and pathogens again. Kellen Finney: If a client comes to you and says, "this strain hasn't been performing well, I want to reset it," do they typically bring you a cut, or would you rather crack a fresh seed? Walk us through that relationship and the screening process. Kristian Andreassen: Usually someone comes to us and says, "I have this strain, I want to put it into tissue culture." We'll isolate it, take multiple cuts, and run it through a testing lab to understand what's actually wrong with the plant. Sometimes it's something simple, like powdery mildew, but sometimes it's HLVD — and there are a lot of people claiming they can get rid of that 100 percent, but I haven't seen that yet. We look at what's wrong first, then take the meristem — this is under a microscope, you can't even see it with the naked eye — and start rebuilding the tissue from that microscopic cut. Usually within three to six months you'll start seeing visible material, and the plant starts rebuilding. Genetics really are key, especially now. I had a friend in Mendocino with an OG cut he'd had for almost thirty years, on forty or fifty acres — you could smell it from his gate, fifty acres away. Over the years that smell got weaker and weaker. We took cuts from him, reversed and cleaned it up through tissue culture, gave it back to him, and last year I went up and saw him, and that smell was back at his gate fifty acres away. He got teary-eyed — he said he hadn't smelled that in fifteen or twenty years. A lot of cultivators develop deep relationships with these plants and don't want to lose them, and a lot of brands are built around them — look what Cookies did with a single cut. Genetics are key, so keeping them safe and at their highest potential is what we do. Bryan Fields: I've heard rumors — fact or fiction — that the only way to truly get rid of HLVD and viroids is through tissue culture. What do you think? Kristian Andreassen: I've seen it attempted, we've done R&D and testing around it, but it's not 100 percent — it's hard to do. The issue is it's at the RNA level rather than the DNA level, so it's even smaller and can almost hide itself. I've seen it test negative, test negative, and then there's a trigger event — like flipping into flower — and suddenly it's back again. It's called latent for a reason; it hides. I think what happens a lot is people are actually just diluting the viroid load in the plant so it doesn't show up on tests, not truly eliminating it. I've seen cases where it stayed out of the plant for a whole outdoor season, testing clean the entire time, but I've also seen it look suppressed and then come back later at another trigger point. We have a world-class pathologist who's been at UC Davis for forty years, and nobody really believes it's fully gone yet. Our stance is that tissue culture is such a closed-loop, sterile environment that there's no chance of cross-contamination — so if it goes in clean, it comes out clean. We test thoroughly to make sure everything going out is clean, and we keep doing R&D, but I don't think anyone on our team would claim they've fully solved it. Bryan Fields: Just ballpark — I know you can't give an exact number — but with that OG grower's story, was there a price range you gave him for that kind of reset, and how does that process typically work? Kristian Andreassen: It changes — we isolate it, test it, see what's wrong, and some issues take longer to resolve than others. Ballpark, it starts around $4,000, and you're talking twelve to fifteen months of work — not constant work, but a lot of it. We're not really making money on that part; we're trying to make our money back on selling plants to them afterward. But yes, we do clean things up and hand them back to clients. Kellen Finney: What about groups that come to you every two or three years — are there studies showing benefits to periodically refreshing genetics that way, versus waiting thirty years like that one grower did? Kristian Andreassen: Oh, absolutely. We have groups that give us their plants, and we'll generate mother stock for them every couple of months; they cut off those mothers three or four times and then discard the plant — that's more the gen-one model, probably a lower cost for them to manage in-house. It's a better start, though you're still opening yourself up to some risk, but a much better start than not doing it at all. Bryan Fields: What about breeders' rights? Kristian Andreassen: Yeah, so one of the things Kevin, our CEO, pitched me on — everyone goes out there saying, "I got this news-hot cut, I got it directly from the breeder," and then they propagate it and the breeder never sees any royalties. It's kind of like what happened with the music industry and Napster — everyone gets the art and spreads it around, and the breeder is left with no financial gain. Kevin and I saw eye to eye on giving a royalty back to the breeder on everything on our menu. Tissue culture is unique because you're betting on where the industry will be in a year to a year and a half. So everything on our menu pays a royalty percentage back to the breeder, so they can keep doing their work — because R&D is expensive, and if breeders are rewarded consistently, they'll keep innovating. I don't know another nursery doing this the way we do — a hundred percent of what's on our menu pays back to a breeder or caregiver. Obviously we can't trace back exactly where something like OG Kush originally came from, but for everything we can trace, someone put in the work to develop and steward it, and they get paid for that. We're big believers in breeders' rights — pay the people doing the work so they can keep doing it. Bryan Fields: I'm sure that also makes other breeders with something really special feel more comfortable bringing it to your team — does that happen too? Kristian Andreassen: Yeah, absolutely, though it's a tough sell — asking someone who says, "I found something amazing," to not share it with anyone else for twelve to fifteen months. But they're getting mailbox money — every quarter we report what we sold, and they get a wire straight to their bank account. We've built relationships with some of the best and biggest breeders in the game, and they're excited to see their work out there and get paid well for it. It's been a great model — everyone wins. Also, a lot of times someone will say, "I have the real Cookies cut," and it turns out it isn't. So we're also verifying genetics — every cut on our menu goes through full genomic testing, which eventually could help with patenting strains. It's like putting a kind of blockchain history stamp on it — this genomic trait has been filed under this breeder, under this name. Kellen Finney: It's also nice for the consumer to know they're supporting the right lineage — it must be so challenging as a consumer walking into a dispensary with 900 choices with no real information, but that stamp gives some direction. How big of an issue is verified genetics and lineage confusion in this industry? Kristian Andreassen: The name game is huge in cannabis right now — everyone's renaming strains because the original name doesn't sell as well anymore, so it becomes "Lemon Cherry Gelato" or whatever. Unfortunately it goes wrong the other way too — I bought a strain marketed as "Rainbow Runtz" that turned out to be Jack Herer, and I got stuck with 200 pounds of Jack nobody wanted. Consumers probably just want a terpene profile or an indica/sativa label, but I think it really falls to the cultivator to know exactly what they're getting, because I've been burned, and it hurts. Bryan Fields: Are there strains your team is watching that you think will be trending twelve to eighteen months from now? Kristian Andreassen: It's tough — it's a big risk putting your eggs in a basket, betting that something will still be in demand a year from now. Kellen Finney: Which one, though — twelve to eighteen months, what's pushing through? Kristian Andreassen: Yeah, it's tough, it's just the three of us here — there's a lot coming. I see gas and candy profiles coming together a lot, and we've made some bets on that. Right now in the California wholesale market, if it's not "candy," it doesn't sell as well, so we've made bets on candies and gas hybrids. Being an East Coaster, I grew up on gas — the sours — before there were even fancy names for things, so my palate leans toward gas. We're also seeing a lot of rotten-fruit profiles and unique stuff we're excited about. Concentrates are also a huge part of the market now — dispensary owners have told me concentrates make up 65 percent of their sales — so we're also breeding and selecting cultivars specifically for higher hash returns. It's a great way for smaller mom-and-pop operations to stay in the game, since hash production is less expensive than full flower harvesting, hanging, and trimming. We've dedicated part of next season's menu specifically to hash-yielding cultivars. Kellen Finney: Do you focus on bud structure for that, since you're washing the material — is structure the main thing you're selecting for? Kristian Andreassen: There are genomic traits involved too. A lot of times the ideal plant isn't super dense — it's a little airier, giving more surface area for trichome development. Something super dense and tight actually has less usable surface area, even if it looks fully crystalled out, it doesn't matter as much. You're also looking at trichome heads — from long relationships with hash makers, you want a bigger head and a smaller stalk, especially for solventless extraction, since you're really going after the heads, not the stalks. There's a lot that goes into picking the right strain for flower versus solventless versus hydrocarbon extraction — you have to have a real pulse on what the industry wants. Bryan Fields: What's the most expensive lesson you've ever learned? Kristian Andreassen: There are a lot of them in this industry — it's tough. You go from learning agriculture at scale, strains that don't perform or mold in certain regions and you lose a crop, to contractual lessons. A lot of us coming from the legacy market into the new market with money and buyers learned that a contract is only as good as the money behind it to uphold it. I've learned that lesson the hard way a handful of times — a contract is great, but unless there's money behind it, it doesn't mean much. Bryan Fields: Dream smoking session, three people, dead or alive? Kristian Andreassen: I'd love to smoke with Bob Marley — always been a big fan, growing up in New York. I actually grew up in upstate New York on Lake George, and DMX used to come up every summer back in the late '90s, so I got to smoke with him a handful of times — I'd like to do that again. And for a third, I'm a geek, so I'd probably want to smoke with some crazy scientist, like Einstein or someone like that. Kellen Finney: What question do you wish more people asked you? Kristian Andreassen: Something like, "how do I pick strains, what's my process?" A lot of people just scroll a menu quickly. I actually have a whole scoring system — almost an algorithm — where I look at it three ways: who bred it, the marketing side of it, and the agronomic traits — is it going to make cultivators money, is it going to be easy to sell, is it going to work well in the California region, indoor, outdoor, mixed-light. I have a whole spreadsheet I fill out for every new strain that spits out a score across those three areas. Bryan Fields: Sounds like you've got some pretty incredible data on that spreadsheet. Kristian Andreassen: I do. Bryan Fields: All right, prediction time — how do you see tissue culture evolving in the cannabis industry over the next decade? Kristian Andreassen: If you look at tissue culture in other high-price crops like grapes and strawberries, it's the standard, and I don't think there's any other way forward for cannabis, since it will remain a high-price crop for a long time. Seed genetics had thirty or forty years of agricultural development that cannabis hasn't had yet — we're thirty or forty years behind on that front. I think tissue culture is really the only way, even now, if people truly crunched the numbers on losses from traditional propagated clones versus tissue culture, more people would jump on it faster. Bryan Fields: Kellen, want to take a swing at that? Kellen Finney: I agree — I think tissue culture becomes standard practice. The only real difference between cannabis and other agricultural industries is that when tissue culture was being developed and applied elsewhere, cannabis was illegal, so growers were forced to rely on techniques that were cheap and easy to do outside a licensed, built-out facility. It is already becoming standard practice. I'm curious to see how the seed-versus-tissue-culture debate plays out, though — there's a bit of a bad taste in some farmers' mouths from the whole Monsanto situation in traditional agriculture, so there could be some hesitancy once it reaches large-scale farming. But over the next decade, I think tissue culture becomes the main driver of cannabis cultivation. Kellen Finney: What do you think, Bryan? Bryan Fields: I'm not totally sure, honestly — this conversation's been really enlightening for me in understanding the unique aspects of it. It sounds like there are enormous pros, and I'd guess the biggest con is the cost that comes with it — but there's clearly a cost to not doing it too, in terms of missed opportunities, and sometimes people have to get punched in the face and lose almost everything before they realize how critical this is. It seems like the benefits are strong now, and probably even more so going forward. Bryan Fields: Kristian, if our listeners want to get in touch and learn more about Conception Nurseries, where can they find you? Kristian Andreassen: ConceptionNurseries.com, and Conception Nurseries on Instagram — we've got a lot of good social media content showing off the plants and the breeders. We'll be at MJBizCon this year — one of our breeders, Mario Guzman, is doing a seed vault at MJBizCon where seed breeders will be able to sell their seeds for the first time and talk directly with attendees. We're working closely with him on genetics as well, so we'll be there too. Unfortunately we can't sell plants there, but a lot of the breeders we work with on the seed side will be there, so if any listeners are around, stop by the booth and talk science, plants, and genetics. Bryan Fields: We'll link it all up in the show notes. Thanks for taking the time, this was a lot of fun. Kristian Andreassen: Thanks, appreciate it.