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This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science. I'm Christopher in Taliatta.

The compounds THC and CBD are known as cannabinoids, because they come from cannabis, aka

marijuana.

Now biologists have taken the genes that produce cannabinoids in weed and plugged them

into yeast.

Yeah, there's several reasons.

The first is cost.

Jay Keesling is a synthetic biologist at UC Berkeley, who has previously programmed yeast

to cheaply produce antimilarial drugs. He says yeast could conceivably produce cannabinoids 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 100 different cannabinoids 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.

Keesling says they can even make cannabinoids that don't exist in nature at all by feeding

...