Print

Yes

No

It depends

[river_lotus]

There's a lot of fraud in the herbal supplement industry. That's a huge problem. I am building an Arduino DNA sequencer and all of a sudden I remembered this and thought - hey, I could make some money with this! You could do a lot of things with it - check an herb to see if it's really what it says it is, check marijuana to see what variety it is, analyze fungal tissue to determine if it's edible, and a lot of other stuff. You'd just need to send a sample and pay a fee. It gets added to a list of vendors and/or products that are either authentic or fraudulent, I make some money, and you end up not eating something that's accidentally poisonous. Let me know what yall think

[sapla]

it might be a good idea, but i think this need is marginal. if you have that knowledge, maybe doing research on plants that have never been studied in detail would be more useful to the community. (like  the study which shows the potential of some salvia).but I don't know if the same technology is applied

1 Like Pollinator likes this.

[ONandONandON]

that's a cool idea, it could make some money if you had competitive prices
(you'd have to compete with already existing companies that do the same thing with professional equipment)
if it can be done at home for a low cost, i would be interested to learn more about the process you are using.
could you explain how one translates the gel plate into real information..?

[Psylocke]

I would be interested in understanding how this works as well. I work in the dietary supplement industry, and I have never heard of using DNA sequencing for identification. The industry standard is TLC or these days HPTLC. I’m guessing DNA sequencing would be more expensive, but potentially more reliable.

1 Like LIBERTYNY likes this.

[river_lotus]

Hey everyone I totally forgot I wrote this.
To answer Sapla's question: I think you might be thinking of a different process. DNA sequencing can't tell you about the potency of an item. What you could do is say "Marijuana/salvia/mushroom strain A and B are genetically distinct". That would help settle arguments between me (herbalist and biology student who is a weed virgin) who says a lot of what is marketed as "strains" is mostly just fancy marketing and my friends (experienced stoners albeit a bit brain-dead at times) who say there really are palpable differences between them. If certain cultivars were associated with potency or effect this could help objectively establish which plants belong to which cultivar, but it wouldn't definitively answer the question as to what alkaloids are present or their potency because that relies on subjective perception.
An added benefit would be that it would also answer a lot of questions that scientists (and veneficium practitioners like myself) still have about Amanita Muscaria and her allies, and Solanum Nigrum complex, but this probably isn't of much interest to anyone here because the nightshades (and according to some, Amanita) are too scary.

To answer ONandONandON - the selling point wouldn't be price, but more transparency and friendliness. I am an independent person with no conflicts of interest and no interest in taking down or promoting herbal companies (though personally I think most herbal companies are essentially selling marked up sawdust in pill form. I try to grow any medicinals I use, or buy them raw and then process them at home).
I'm not totally sure how one gets from leaf to raw genetic material, but the process seems to bevery simple. I actually did this in high school once in science class - we isolated our dna (which looked like a blob of snot) and put it in a little vial and made it into a necklace and gave it to my mom for mother's day.  Now obviously that's probably not going to be refined enough to make use of but from watching laboratory tutorials it's basically that just with a lot of extra steps to get rid of any junk material like cell tissues or dust or whatever.

To answer Psylocke: Hey aren't u the one who sent a request to GRIN? How did that go?
Home based DNA sequencing isn't terribly expensive. A brief survey shows that a DIY home lab could probably be built under $1000. For instance compare a lab centrifuge ($300-6,000) to a centrifuge invented by stanford scientists for use in poor regions ($.20). Actually there was a brief renewed interest in this subject because of the Coronavirus - having cheap equipment means testing is more accessible.
I would imagine that it's probably the most reliable way of determining what's in something, be it Ikea's horsemeat meatballs, misidentified fish at your local seafood restaurant, one of the many LBMs (little brown mushrooms) that are impossible to identify, a strain of bacteria, hair left at a crime scene... as long as it is or was alive, DNA can identify it with a degree of near perfect certainty. There is no arguing with DNA evidence. The only problem is that the techniques are still imperfect, but since DNA barcoding has a reputation for being the holy grail of identifying living (or once living) tissue I expect that all of those obstacles will be overcome in not much time.