Straight answers for operators.

About six months. The engagement covers facility assessment, clean-room design, equipment sourcing, SOP development, media formulation, hands-on training, and commissioning. By month six your team operates the lab and produces its own Gen-0 clones. District Cannabis went from design in December 2025 to a live lab by the end of March 2026.

Facility assessment, clean-room design and layout, equipment sourcing, construction oversight with your contractors, customized SOPs, media formulation, hands-on staff training in sterile technique and micropropagation, and commissioning. You end with a working lab and a team that runs it.

HLVd (hop latent viroid, also written HpLVd) is an infectious RNA pathogen that silently reduces cannabis potency, yield, and vigor. It is removed through meristem culture: isolating the clean meristematic tip of the plant and regenerating a clean plant from it, verified by qPCR testing before it returns to production.

Yes. HLVd (also written HpLVd) is remediated through meristem culture: we isolate the clean meristematic tip, verify it clean by qPCR, and rebuild your library as clean Gen-0 mother stock, in your facility. Standard testing and cleanup alone do not remove it, so meristem culture is the only proven fix. We run it as a standalone project or fold it into a lab build or rehab.

Yes. That is the entire model. We train your team hands-on and document every protocol so they run clean-stock production without ongoing dependence on a consultant. The engagement ends with your team self-sufficient.

Your team owns and runs the lab. Optional ongoing support is available as a monthly retainer covering strategy calls, periodic on-site visits, protocol refinements, HLVd cleanup, and cold storage. It is optional, not required. You are not locked in.

Licensed commercial cannabis cultivators and multi-state operators, in the United States and internationally, who want to bring tissue culture and clean-stock production in-house rather than outsourcing clone production. Recent clients include District Cannabis, Story Cannabis, Eastern Sierra Group, and Nimbus Farms.

A lab built in six months for District Cannabis, a Story Cannabis program operational for nearly a year, and 250+ cultivars preserved coast to coast through tissue culture and cold storage.

Outsourced clones are inconsistent and can reintroduce pathogens like HLVd. An in-house clean-stock program gives you control over genetic quality, consistency, and supply, and preserves your elite cultivars in cold storage so they are never lost.

The cost of an in-house tissue culture lab is driven mostly by scale, equipment choices, and the state of the space you start with. A larger cultivar library and higher production volume need more hood time, more growth-chamber capacity, and more media throughput, which is where the money goes. A room that already has clean power, water, and environmental control costs less to convert than one built from scratch. We scope the real number to your facility on the consultation rather than quoting a generic figure.

A tissue culture lab needs a laminar flow hood for sterile work, an autoclave to sterilize media and tools, a growth room or chamber with controlled light and temperature, a media-prep area, and shelving and consumables. The hood does the heavy lifting on contamination control, and growth-chamber capacity is usually what caps how much you can produce. We source the right equipment for your scale so you are not over-buying or bottlenecked on day one.

Meristem culture removes HLVd by regenerating a clean plant from the meristem, the tiny growing tip of the shoot that the viroid has not reached. We isolate the clean meristematic tip, grow a new plant from it in tissue culture, and verify it clean by qPCR before it goes back into production. It is the only reliable way to clear HLVd, because heat therapy and roguing do not eliminate it once it is in the plant.

Genetic cold storage is long-term preservation of clean plant tissue at low temperature so a cultivar can be regenerated years later. A lab needs it because it is insurance: if you lose your mother plants to a contamination event or a bad season, cold-storage tissue lets you bring those genetics back. It is how we have preserved 250+ cultivars coast to coast, so an elite cultivar is never one accident away from being gone for good.

A tissue culture lab produces clean genetics in a sterile setting, while a mother room keeps stock plants for taking traditional cuttings. A mother room can quietly hold and spread HLVd across every clone you pull from it. A tissue culture lab starts clean, screens for pathogens, and regenerates Gen-0 stock that outperforms cuttings from older or infected mothers. The lab is upstream: it feeds clean plants into the room, instead of the room slowly degrading your library.

Media is the sterile nutrient gel that cannabis tissue grows on in the lab, and getting the recipe right is what makes propagation clean and consistent. Each stage, from initiation to multiplication to rooting, wants a different formulation, and small changes in the recipe show up as differences in vigor and contamination. We formulate media to your cultivars and train your team to prep and track it, because a lab that dials in its media is a lab that produces predictable clean stock.