 What doesn't often think of hemp in space, but that's where it's headed. I'm joined with Front Range Biosciences CEO Dr. Jonathan Vott. You got to explain this to me because I looked at what your company is doing and I found it so fascinating. Why are you sending hemp to space? That's a great question. So our company is focused on breeding and development of new hemp varieties and one of the tools that we use is genomics to better understand how the plant performs from a biological perspective and by putting plants into a unique environment like space where there's zero gravity, it gives us an opportunity to understand how the underlying biology of the plant works in this new environment and if you imagine for a second that plants on earth spend most of their energy growing up and define gravity when you take gravity away the question comes where does all that energy go? So it goes into other pathways, it goes into other unique characteristics that we might observe in these plants in the zero gravity environment. So what are some real-world applications from this information that you're going to learn? Well, the first experiment is really just to lay the foundation to understand what types of changes we observe at the molecular level or at the genomic level in these plants and then from there we hope to use some of that to better inform our genomic mapping studies which help us develop markers for improved breeding which leads to a more efficient and streamlined breeding process basically. And so once you're able to map those genomes does that mean that you can really lock down certain varieties and strains of hemp like okay, this is the one that is best for this purpose or also to permit the idea that you know you could almost maybe patent some of these these particular genes. Yeah, so certainly intellectual property is an important part of our strategy in terms of how we protect our new plant varieties but but I think the the important thing to keep in mind is that with a better understanding of the underlying genome and how that affects the different characteristics or traits in the plant we can better target our breeding and so by exposing these plants to zero gravity and then even exposing them to other stressors like unique salt concentrations or even pathogens or other stressors that might cause the plant to to mutate for example or to respond to the stress of that environment. It opens the door for us to better understand how we could breed for traits that might improve performance here on earth. So things like certain types of mineral content or or other salt content in the soil for example that that might not be beneficial if we can breed plants that can grow more effectively in some of these more challenging environments here on earth. It opens the door for farmers to be able to grow without having to put as much effort and resource into growing and managing their plants. Okay, how did you arrange this because one doesn't just say hey will you bring my hemp seeds to space and and and you're going out on SpaceX. So explain to me that process. How did you actually get this to happen? Yeah, so it's it's kind of interesting how these how these things come about for sure. So we're one of the few companies in the industry that does or uses a process called tissue culture. So we actually work with plants in a laboratory setting and the plant samples that we're actually going to be sending to space are actually not seeds. They're not even whole plants. It's actually a form of the plant called callus. So this is basically like plant stem cells that will be in a petri dish and when we So we're one of the only companies that has the ability to do this in hemp and And as well as coffee and we're also sending coffee. It's not just hemp But we're also sending coffee callus to space as well to understand the effects on that plant But so it's a it's a unique form And so we were one of the few companies that actually had the ability to do this And quickly because the timelines have been fairly quick to meet the launch Timing which is just in in a couple of weeks now. I think so So anyway, so yeah, and so we're working with a company called space cells They're funding the project and it's a three-way collaboration between space cells the bioserve group out of the University of Colorado at Boulder So that's actually where I did my PhD work. So I have some connections to see you Boulder So there's a bunch of connections here that brought all this together But at the end of the day, it's it's a joint collaboration between those groups And then we'll obviously be working with the ISS national lab International space station To to coordinate the effort as that's where most of the the experiment will take place up in space Do you get to go to the launch? I Could yeah, we'll see if my schedule will allow me to I have a pretty busy schedule Running running the company, but we'll see I think some of my staff it for sure might be there the ones that prepared the samples And and I believe that the bioserve Center at CU they actually will have footage and they have 24-hour camera monitoring of what's going on in the space station and and launch and all of the different parts of the project So there will be an opportunity I think for us to to view it a lot of it live Via TV. All right. Well, this is super interesting that the thought that we're taking, you know, this Very old plant that's that's known for many old industrial uses and then bringing it to space to see what's going to happen That is dr. Jonathan bot from Front Range Biosciences, and I'm Deborah Borchardt with the Green Marker report