The headline number stays at seventy-nine. The interesting number is sixteen. Stellenbosch University's Magriet Muller and André de Villiers identified seventy-nine phenolic compounds across three South African cannabis strains using two-dimensional liquid chromatography coupled to high-resolution mass spectrometry — twenty-five of them new to the species. Sixteen belong to a structural class never before documented in cannabis at all: flavoalkaloids [1].

Tuesday's first read named the Stellenbosch phenolic inventory and the rare-class hit. The second-day read is about why the class was hidden. Flavoalkaloids combine a flavonoid core with a proline or pyrrolidine-like alkaloid moiety; their concentrations are low and their structures shadow the much more abundant flavonoids in conventional one-dimensional separations. "This kind of separation is only possible with the use of two-dimensional LC," de Villiers said in the press release [2].

The compounds clustered in the leaves of one strain — code-named Blue Sky in some accounts — and largely absent from the other two [3]. That strain-specific distribution is itself the finding cannabinoid-only research could not have produced. The Stellenbosch authors note that fewer than forty flavonoids had been catalogued across the genus before this paper. Cannabis carries more than 750 known metabolites. Most of the genome of its chemistry has been studied as if it were the cannabinoid pathway and a footnote.

Pharmaceutical relevance is hypothetical. The structures need full elucidation; bioactivity assays do not yet exist. But the leaf, treated as waste at industrial scale, just got a chemistry of its own.

-- KENJI NAKAMURA, Tokyo