GrowthNotes

Over the past year we have witnessed industry concerns become widespread regarding the impacts of the known Cannabis pathogen Hop Latent Viroid (HLVd) with reports of contaminated crops emerging around the globe.  HLVd has proven to cause substantial Cannabis crop damage and even complete crop loss.  The latent nature of this pathogen, its relatively easy transmission, and concerns with testing accuracy make management for this specific pathogen especially challenging for growers.  The rapid spread of HLVd across the global Cannabis business community should serve as a warning sign, as there will surely be many more major pathogen challenges in the years to come.   

Segra sounded an alarm bell publicly about HLVd this past spring through the publishing of a white paper on the topic.  We also hosted an in-depth webinar discussing our industry-leading in-house HLVd test and the measures we take at Segra to ensure HLVd and other critical plant pathogens are not detectable in our plantlet products.  In recent months we have seen a major uptick in clients identifying this pathogen in their facilities which is driving increased interest in accessing our Verified Segra Stock™ cultivars, and also our services to remediate this pathogen from client-owned cultivars.   

Today we are proud to share that we have validated a process in recent months to remediate HLVd from infected cultivars through our use of a proprietary protocol developed by Segra’s Dr. Sma Zobayed and his research team.  To date, we have now effectively remediated over 7 cultivars for numerous clients.  The remediation process may also in theory remove other virus and viroid’s that we are not even able to identify yet.

Segra’s “Regenerate and Preserve” program, where we “clean up” and store Cannabis cultivars for our clients, is proving to be more important than ever before.  This program allows our customers to have confidence that they are starting clean with every crop, and also take advantage of off-site genetic banking services to maintain back-up copies of high-value cultivars.  This is all part of our commitment to be a critical industry partner to growers around the globe.