Dr Antony Martin (PhD) will develop a library of unique plant strains that have been chemically phenotyped via customised massively high throughput crop phenotyping platforms for the full spectrum of cannabinoid compounds, with effective databasing of information. This work will feed off of his team’s experience (e.g. breeding programs for bioenergy crops, commercial breeding and genetic marker discovery in rice (International Rice Research Institute) and tobacco
(CSIRO) using engineering, manufacturing, machine learning and web development. Novel cannabis varieties will be generated by creating recombinant inbred and chemically mutagenized cannabis populations using unique selections from the diversity panel as parent lines. These novel cannabis varieties will also be chemically phenotyped for the full spectrum of cannabinoid compounds. Seed from these lines and phenotype data will be stored in a searchable database.
Stable seed lines will then be produced from a large selection of lines with unique cannabinoid profiles, forming the basis of a library of unique plant strains for use in medicinal cannabis clinical trials, as well as various synthetic cannabinoids available in the market, and metabolites. This library will be a unique tool for matching phenotypic and metabolomic profiles with desired quality indications for optimal clinical trial design.