In the phase 1 data set, the least amount of measured CBDA content was
11.80% of the total measured cannabinoid content. However, this sample
also had unusually high levels of CBD, indicating extensive enzymatic or
heat-induced decarboxylation. The highest amount of CBDA was 83.24% of
the total cannabinoid content, and the mean CBDA content was 58.59%
(SEM 2.84%, n = 30). CBD content is the next most abundant constituent
and ranged from a low of 6.09% of the total measured cannabinoids to a
high of 75.04% of the total, with the mean being 24.56% (SEM 2.89%, n
= 30).
Histograms, Q-Q plots, and scatter plots by both supplier and cultivar
were produced for all measured and computed analyte values. The
supplemental data addendum contains all of these charts. Visual
inspection shows many of the histograms indicate right-tailed skew, with
the majority of values clustered on the lower end of the scales.
Visual inspection of each cannabinoid’s content was conducted by
applying color scales to the percentage-of-content table on a per sample
(row-by-row) basis. The per-sample color-scaling creates a heatmap
showing the analytes with the greatest to least percentage of the
cannabinoid content, as shown in Table 9. Darker to lighter shares of
red indicate the higher percentages, medium percentages are highlighted
in shades of yellow, and the lowest percentages of cannabinoid content
are in green. Note that some totals do not add up to 100% due to small
rounding errors.
Differences in cannabinoid content by cultivar are also observable when
samples are placed in a row-oriented heatmap and sorted by cultivar, as
shown in Table 10. Differences are also observed when row-oriented
heat-mapped data is sorted and categorized by the supplier, as in Table
11. The color-coding in Table 10 and Table 11 both follow the same
scheme as described for Table 9, where red indicates more copious
amounts of any specific cannabinoid, yellow being moderate levels, and
green indicates lower levels of the analyte. Strong similarities were
observed between cannabinoid content in the scatter plots by the
supplier and by cultivar, but this relationship is not surprising since
most manufacturers only supplied a single cultivar.
Each supplier was assigned a unique identifier, and these values were
transformed and coded into a series of new dichotomous variables to
investigate any supplier-related variance. A series of linear regression
tests with 0.05 significance were performed on the analytes having
statistically normal distribution using supplier-encoded dichotomous
variables as coefficients.
For the phase 1 data set, the regression analysis was limited to CBCA,
CBDA, and CBNA. The supplemental data addendum contains the model
summary data, ANOVA, and coefficients for the regression of these four
tests. A summary of each regression analysis done with the suppliers (n
= 30) is provided in Table 1Table 3:
Table
3: Phase 1 regression of analytes and suppliers