Sticky Hands Laboratories

And some videos and pictures of success. My experiments don’t only show failures — success is part of the process too.

For this run I picked the most sterile start possible: a good quality seed. After surface sterilization and germination in peroxide, I got a set of clean popped seeds ready for in vitro propagation. Since everything is sealed, I don’t need heavy pre-cleaning. By observing development dynamics and overall appearance I’ll judge how clean and viable the plants are.

Right now I have no ventilation in the jars, which creates a moisture problem. This is common with this type of jar. Soon some PTFE hydrophobic membranes will arrive and I’ll add vents to regulate moisture.

Why seed propagation instead of saving something that already exists? I have a triploid from Humboldt that I want to try to pop and establish in TC. This is easier than doing meristem cuts and hoping there is no virus present — that process takes much more time.

I think it’s more productive to start from a cleaner environment and then adapt a selected seedling to ex vitro conditions. There is less contamination risk across the whole operation with this method. As I see it, the whole process is about managing compounded risks.

Only three triploid seeds in this run

That’s why aviation works, medicine works, engineering works. Without shared rules, every system becomes noise

This is some videos of failed explants.

Pretreatment against endophytic contaminants is very important, I suppose, and picking a clean plant to make samples from is also very important for sure — the main success starts there.

The structure of a plant plays a huge role in the success rate of attempts, and your cleaning methods need to go accordingly with the structure you work with.

I’m not sure about virus contamination, but let’s say I can track the speed of development and pick only beautiful-looking ones.

For cannabis, I picked the road of popping seeds first and then checking them through a TC cycle to find stable samples, and then hunt for females.

Will try to flower them in a TC jar — micro-growing kinda haha

Because we are talking about hash, I think there is a slight trade-off. We collect hydrophobic parts of the plant, so we can grow it in semi-outdoor conditions.

Glass greenhouse tech — you have sun and natural soil, best for secondary metabolite synthesis, protected from bugs, and we collect not all the flower but only hydrophobic parts, so processing is cleaner.

In this production method we maximize our growing conditions and pair them with the right product idea, keeping in mind strengths and weaknesses.

Glass greenhouse → closer to environment → we collect only hydrophobic parts
Sun → harder to control → terpene boost
Living soil → not as fast as hydroponics → richer secondary metabolite profile
No drying focus → not aiming for perfect flowers → faster production cycle

We could never fully replicate the sun and soil and their biological effects on the plant. It’s more than just “chemicals.” We are only starting to understand the complexity of plant life and ecosystem mechanics.

We use indoor laboratory methods to make sure nothing else touches the flower — but this comes with a trade-off. You can’t have the best of two worlds. You need to choose. Every method has limited optimal outcomes. The more complex the tool, the more limited it becomes in its own way.

In one product we take the whole flower. In another, only the hydrophobic parts. That’s a very specific difference — and we can play with it.

My personal opinion:

Indoor can make good hash. But matching proper sun + living soil resin complexity is very hard.

For smokable flowers it’s the opposite.

So by choosing indoor from the start, you already limit your product architecture and flavor spectrum. If you don’t understand this — you’re designing blindly

What do you need to make good hash?

Let’s separate things from the beginning — buds and hash are completely different products and need totally different environments and rules for perfect conditions.

Hash is a head of a glandular trichome. It’s a defense tool of a plant against sun and bugs. It has different polarity than the plant — it’s hydrophobic.

During THCA synthesis, H₂O₂ (peroxide) is produced as a byproduct of the reaction, and it’s toxic, so the plant needs to utilize and neutralize it. Cannabinoids have cytotoxic and antimicrobial effects — that’s part of their defensive role. They are synthesized in secretory disk cells and stored outside of the main plant body in the trichome head cavity.

Synthesis is costly. Not every plant can afford strong metabolic responses and form a solid defense in the form of trichomes. And it’s not the only way for a plant — it’s just what we need for us.

To perform good synthesis, a plant needs a well-developed root system that can supply high amounts of nutrients and hormones and support overall vitality. And here we face ecosystem design

Stealing ideas is a sport we need to make great again.

I was thinking about how I accidentally picked the nickname “Sticky Hands” and what it represents. Lately, I came to an idea — let’s make it a theme. Stealing ideas by observing products and reverse engineering them for fun.

It’s technically impossible to hide every detail. If you know what to look for, you can reverse engineer almost anything. This is what I mean by “stealing.” My version of stealing is extracting the core concept and adapting it to my environment.

This is what I preach now: it’s useless to recreate environments without “stealing” and adapting the core concept behind them.

“Jack of all trades, master of none” is a real limitation. But can you master one meta-skill that allows you to master many? There are no limits to human imagination — and this is where this kind of “stealing” happens.

You don’t need to fully master tissue culture to understand its workflow if you can construct the factory in your imagination. The rest is ex*****on — memory and body solving the physical constraints. Then comes time spent physically mastering the skill.

Now we have LLMs that amplify imagination even further. This is what people are really talking about — we need imagination, not simple imitation. A robot can imitate better than you, and that shift will happen within the next decade.

But what built all of this? Imagination. Every factory first existed in imagination, then on paper, and only then in physical reality.

I remember a story about a Soviet engineer who was allegedly feared in the USA for this exact ability. They didn’t want him seeing their factories because they believed he could replicate — and possibly improve — everything he observed.

That is the skill you need. Not copy–paste.

What do you think of mother plant preparation before taking cuttings?
I was thinking about making a foliar spray and applying it before cutting clones, but it seems like a bad idea from what I’ve been reading. In Plant Physiology by Vince Ördög, he discusses how plants with high cytokinins have more yield, and this was my starting point for making a foliar spray with cytokinins.

Here are some points I found:
High cytokinin does not “raise auxin.” It increases the number of times auxin can successfully initiate new organs.
Auxin = positional signal
Cytokinin = proliferative capacity regulator

It seems like a foliar spray can only act as a signaling stimulus; it cannot supplement the plant in the same way as cytokinins synthesized by the plant itself. Plants synthesize cytokinins in the roots, and this is basically a genetic factor. It is theoretically possible to modulate it via root zone inputs, but it is tricky and needs further research.

First things first — get your genetics right with strong vitality to boost plant metabolism, and then we can add some variables for commercial purposes. THC and terpenes are secondary metabolites, and their synthesis costs the plant something; it is a toxic process, so vitality is needed to support it.

CK biosynthesis is not purely genetic — it is genetically controlled but environmentally modulated. However, the limitations are genetic, and how epigenetics expresses itself is also part of the primary mechanism that you need to select for first

Rooting Gel
This is my first attempt at making rooting gel. This time, the choice fell on synergy! Because I don’t have many hormones to spare, I need to be wise. By combining two, I can lower the total amount of chemicals used in the creation of this gel, and this makes it economically reasonable too.
After some research, I discovered that there are basically 2-3 gelling agents to choose from. And if we want to make it good, it needs to be HEC (as Clonex has, at 1.2%).
There should not be any sugar, vitamins, or mineral supplements at all. They feed contaminants, and the plant cannot do two things simultaneously—either root or grow.
And some preservative such as potassium sorbate to halt fungal growth. This works well with the pH of 5.8 that we need.
Final concentrations:
• IBA: 2000 ppm
• NAA: 500 ppm
• HEC: 1.2%
• PS: 0.1%
• pH: 5.8

Some microscope 🔬 time, clean thing I can say. And here is some videos for you

This is the setup and how I do it. I’m still within my first 300 jars in tissue culture, learning how to run a truly sterile process.

This is the skeleton 💀. The main goal is sterile work — can I actually do it? The rest is genetics or protocol, and that just takes time.

Meat will grow. What truly matters are the bones. And the bones are work ethic — the discipline that allows sterility to exist.

It either works or it doesn’t. It’s that simple. There is no in-between. Either we have a sterile plant, or we don’t. If there is bacteria, it’s not tissue culture. Even one contaminant can ruin the entire operation and force a restart.

Can you bargain with bacteria 🦠? Offer it gold? Promise it heaven so it won’t eat your plant in a TC jar?