Marijuana Business Magazine July 2019

Marijuana Business Magazine | July 2019 84 1 Prepare a Biosafety Cabinet Rm3 Labs prepares a NuAire biosafety cabinet for biocontaminant testing. Biosafety cabinets provide a ventilated, clean and enclosed workspace equipped with High Efficiency Particulate Air (HEPA) filters that capture and trap microcontaminants and microparticles. This provides an aseptic or contaminant-free environment for laboratory analysts to split samples. For example, one product sample may be split for two or more tests—say biocontaminants and pesticides. Rm3 uses biosafety cabinets to minimize the risk of exposing samples to contaminants that might be present in the environment or other samples. B iocontaminants such as yeast, mold, E. coli and salmonella can be a costly problem for marijuana cultivators or cannabis-infused product manufacturers. They can wreak havoc on a facility or cause product to fail mandatory tests, which can require large batches to be destroyed or remediated and sold at a discount on the wholesale market. Operators often don’t detect these fungal and bacterial contaminants until it’s too late. “You can’t see them, you don’t know they’re there, but they’re ubiquitous in our environment,” said Alena Rodriguez, the managing director of Rm3 Labs, a Boulder, Colorado-based cannabis testing laboratory. “It’s important that we’re able to use different technologies to detect these seemingly invisible contaminants.” Monitoring the microbial loads of cannabis flower or infused products such as edibles and beverages is a critical part of the laboratory testing process. Rm3 Labs invited Marijuana Business Magazine to its facility to give operators a behind-the-scenes peek at some of the best practices for biocontaminant testing. A Day in the Life