About the lab

Nathan Johnson, PhD

I run the lab. My training is in bioinformatics and computational biology, with a PhD from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and my graduate training began in molecular biology and genetic engineering at the University of Missouri. Before this lab I worked in computational biology for preclinical oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, and H3 Biomedicine, and before that as a production microbiologist running pathogen isolation and identification on hundreds of samples a day.

The cancer work is how I got here. I met people using cannabis to manage the symptoms of their treatment, got curious about the plant, and found that the people growing it did not have the tools every other crop takes for granted: validated diagnostics, a way to investigate a failing room, and a place to keep clean genetics. Commercial cultivators were being asked to run a serious agricultural operation without them. So that is what this lab builds.

The lab does three things. Root cause analysis, where we take a problem apart with microscopy, culture, sequencing, and qPCR until we know what is driving it. Testing, from a validated qPCR panel for the viroid, viruses, and fungal pathogens that matter in cannabis production, ordered and reported through the customer portal, to sequencing, environmental testing, and custom assays. And tissue culture, under the CleanPheno name, where lines are cleaned up, held as tested stock, and banked.

The model we are working toward is a genetic resource center for cultivators: one place where a grower's lines are tested, kept clean, backed up, and documented, so a crop loss or a contamination event is a setback and not the end of a cultivar.

Two things we hold to. We report what the data supports and nothing more: a result is "detected" or "not detected" in that sample on that day. And we treat what customers tell us about their operations as confidential, in the lab and on this site.