The world of cannabis science is often shrouded in mystery and unlike other scientific industries where knowledge is shared — knowledge in the cannabis testing industry is protected — not shared. Well, I am here to help inform aspiring scientists around the world of this one fact — everything you need to know to set up and run a cannabinoids separation method for potency determination is within the public domain!
By Eric Burtin Martin P.S. links to methods at the bottom) Whether you are an aspiring chemist looking to enter the industry who is looking to learn or you are a PhD seeking tried and true methodologies in this 'budding' industry, this article is for you. Cannabis flower next to an Erlenmeyer flask source It is this lack of knowledge sharing and collaboration that contributes to lab-to-lab variance and leads to the articles you may have read that claim something along the lines of, "Potency values vary drastically from lab to lab." This inter-lab variance makes it very difficult for clients to choose the right lab. Why is this you may ask? Well, it is mainly due to the fact that cannabis is still a federally illegal substance — discouraging organizations with analytical expertise from developing reliable and robust analytical methods. On top of that, each state has its own unique regulations, adding a whole other layer of variability between inter-state labs. Well, until a consensus arises, everyone is on their own unless we collaborate and share the limited resources that are available. It is the wild wild west in the cannabis testing space and that is why we need to have access to open-source scientific material to help bring as much accuracy and reproducibility to the space as possible! source With all this said though, there is already a plethora of free, no copyright, open-access information for scientists and start-ups to utilize — You just need to know where to look. Let's take a look at some tips on how to find some now. Tip # 1: filetype:pdf Let's start off with a cool one. When attempting to search for a scientific article on Google there are a few tricks to finding some great resources — one of which is the nifty search by filetype function. So let's search for some great free cannabinoids analysis and separation methods using this function. Search query => cannabis HPLC separation methods filetype:pdf Voila! As you can see, we already…