This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagiata.

The compounds THC and CBD are known as

cannabonoids because they come from cannabis, aka marijuana.

Now biologists have taken the genes that produce canabonoids in weed

and plugged them into yeast.

Yeah, there's several reasons.

The first is cost.

Jay Kiesling is a synthetic biologist at UC Berkeley

who has previously programmed yeast to cheaply produce antramlarial drugs.

He says yeast could conceivably produce canabonoids

for about $400 a

kilogram that's compared to the $40,000 a kilo price tag

when using synthetic chemistry. Other benefits exist too. There are about a

hundred different

canabonoids that naturally occur in cannabis, but it's been really

hard to do research on those because there's not much available. They are

produced in such minute quantities in the cannabis that you'd have to

purify huge amounts of cannabis just to give a small quantity of them to test.

Kiesling says they can even make canappanoids that don't exist in nature at all by feeding the yeast certain fatty

acids.

The results in canabonoids, which are chemically similar, but not identical, to garden

...