Front Range Scientific Computations

Rationale Cannabichromene (CBC) is a non-psychoactive cannabinoid attracting significant interest for its potential therapeutic applications. However, the factors governing CBC production in Cannabis sativa remain largely unknown. Objectives

Objective: This study explores the family planning counselling that adolescents receive during pregnancy care, with the aim of identifying those factors that make counselling effective or ineffective. Methods: The study population consisted of ten adolescents who had recently given birth and ten health care providers. Adolescents were recruited using posters; providers, by email. Individual semistructured interviews were conducted and analyzed in keeping with grounded theory. Analysis consisted of open coding (identification of initial concepts), axial coding (drawing connections between repetitive and similar concepts), and selective coding (clustering of categories to identify themes). Results: The adolescent participants desired detailed information about pregnancy and motherhood, were challenged by the disruptive effects of pregnancy, and were strongly reliant on nonmedical support people. Our participants described that the adolescent-provider relationship was strengthened when providers sought to empower adolescents and to provide a balance of support and independence. Judgment and bias interfered with relationship building. Postpartum continuity with the pregnancy care provider and a positive relationship with the family physician were both highly desirable yet highly variable. In general, the adolescents found family planning counselling an awkward and intimate undertaking and preferred providers to slowly progress towards explicit counselling. The adolescents who opted not to initiate postpartum contraception still found the counselling process informative and beneficial. Conclusion: Effective family planning counselling is not information driven but rather gradual, individualized, and context focused. This article has been peer reviewed.

Background: Pregnancy and the postpartum period raise many sexual health concerns for women. Registered midwives (RMs) care for an increasing proportion of Canadian pregnancies. The study objective was to assess RMs’ experiences providing sexual health counselling. Methods: A 22-item questionnaire exploring RMs’ experiences, competence, and comfort, as well as barriers to discussing sexual health, was distributed electronically to British Columbian RMs. Results: Of 330 RMs, 91 (28%) responded. The majority of midwives reported discussing sexual health concerns with greater than 75% of clients (49/91 [53.8%]). Most estimated the time spent was less than 30 minutes over the pregnancy (69/91 [76%]). Common topics were sexual activity postpartum (82/91 [90.1%]), contraception (89/91 [97.8%]), and cervical cancer screening (86/91 [94.5%]). Less than half discussed sexual problems, including pain or low desire. RMs rated themselves highly competent and comfortable addressing sexual health. However, many identified lack of training, time, and cultural differences as barriers. Respondents cited desire for community resources and training in the areas of contraception, pain and, low desire. Conclusions: British Columbian RMs feel confident addressing many sexual health concerns during pregnancy but cited lack of training as a common barrier. Investment in educational resources for RMs may help to improve sexual health care for all Canadian women. This article has been peer reviewed.

Abstract Increased farming and cultivation ofCannabis sativais rapidly pushing Cannabis (Cannabis sativaL.) towards becoming a commercial agricultural commodity. Large-scale cultivation facilities maintain thousands of clonal varieties of recreational and medicinal cannabis and there is a strong market-driven motivation to maintain a commercial pipeline of clean healthy vigorously growing plants free of pathogens. However, mass production and high-capacity cultivation create an environment that is susceptible to highly transmissible pathogens and infectious entities such as Hop Latent Viroid (HLVd). From nurseries to cultivation facilities, it’s become increasingly important to maintain a routine testing regimen and ensure cultivation facilities are HLVd-free environments. One method to address the problem of infected plants is to perform thermotherapy onC. sativaexplants under tissue culture conditions and isolate clean tissue to multiply productive and healthy mature plants. We carried out a novel thermotherapy method using tissue culture in 5 varieties of type III cannabis that were HLVd positive to document the degree of success of the treatment at the RNA level. We observed that following thermotherapy treatment we were able to decrease the level of HLVd positive tests in select varieties and observed some varieties were highly susceptible and unable to clear the viroid. Plants were tested using a one-step RT-qPCR method, developed and validated, in part, along with this work, and present the results as well as an exploratory transcriptome analysis of an internally developed variety, AnnaLee, which tested negative for HLVd following thermotherapy treatment, and explore possible genes of interest for viroid infection, clearance, and mitigation.Author SummaryRT-qPCR and transcriptome analysis of Hops latent viroid (HLVd) in infected and non-infectedCannabisvarieties. A thermotherapy procedure was conducted on HLVd infectedCannabis sativameristem tissue maintained through tissue culture micropropagation techniques. Total RNA was isolated from the cultured plantlet stocks and evaluated by a real-time reverse transcriptase assay for HLVd. Infection status post thermotherapy was assessed, and viroid-free plants were maintained and subsequently tested. A single thermotherapy-treated cultivar, Anna Lee was selected for transcriptomics, and an analysis of the genes that were differentially regulated in infected and non-infected treated plants is discussed.

The widespread legalization of Cannabis has opened the industry to using contemporary analytical techniques for chemotype analysis. Chemotypic data has been collected on a large variety of oil profiles inherent to the cultivars that are commercially available. The unknown gene regulation and pharmacokinetics of dozens of cannabinoids offer opportunities of high interest in pharmacology research. Retailers in many medical and recreational jurisdictions are typically required to report chemical concentrations of at least some cannabinoids. Commercial cannabis laboratories have collected large chemotype datasets of diverse Cannabis cultivars. In this work a data set of 17,600 cultivars tested by Steep Hill Inc., is examined using machine learning techniques to interpolate missing chemotype observations and cluster cultivars into groups based on chemotype similarity. The results indicate cultivars cluster based on their chemotypes, and that some imputation methods work better than others at grouping these cultivars based on chemotypic identity. Due to the missing data and to the low signal to noise ratio for some less common cannabinoids, their behavior could not be accurately predicted. These findings have implications for characterizing complex interactions in cannabinoid biosynthesis and improving phenotypical classification of Cannabis cultivars.

Many problems of interest in plasma modeling are subject to the ‘tyranny of scales’, specifically, problems that encompass physical processes that operate on timescales that are separated by many orders of magnitude. Investigating such problems therefore requires the use of implicit timeintegration schemes, which advance problem solutions on the timescale of interest, while incorporating the physics of the fast-timescales. One promising route to develop these implicit solvers is the combination of Jacobian-Free Newton-Krylov methods with physics-based pre-conditioners.