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Scientists Finally Unlock the Recipe For Magic Mushrooms (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Aside from being a schedule 1 drug, scientists haven't fully understood the chemistry behind how mushrooms produce the chemical psilocybin -- until now. A new study may finally lay the groundwork for a medical-grade psilocybin patients can take. Gizmodo reports: "Living things make molecules through a series of chemical reactions, similar to how car makers produce cars on assembly lines. Enzymes act as the workers/robots, speeding up the reactions by helping put the pieces together. Actually making psilocybin requires mapping the biological factory. A 1968 paper (obviously it was in 1968) offered a proposed order of events leading to a finished psilocybin molecule, by adding radioactive elements and watching what happened to them on the assembly line. The researchers thought that maybe tryptophan, the amino acid everyone wrongly says makes you sleepy, was the first piece, which then went through four successive steps to become the finished product. The new study shows that the 1968 paper got the order wrong, and introduces the responsible genes and enzymes, the workers that do the specific task to get the final product. This time around, mapping the factory required sequencing the genomes of two magic mushroom species, Psilocybe cubensis and Psilocybe cyanescens. Then, the researchers found exactly which genes produce the required enzymes and spliced them into E. coli bacteria. Using those enzymes, they were able to rebuild the factory and create their own psilocybin." The study has been published in the German journal Angewandte Chemie.
1968, one year before Woodstock.
#DeleteFacebook
No, no, no, no, He's outside looking in.
Personally, I'm excited to see what this brings for treatment of depression and social anxiety. And maybe in twenty years, we'll come around and be willing to explore micro-dosing for medical purposes. (There is anecdotal evidence that it reduces emotional PMS to zero for a lot of women, and I'm curious what it does for those with reduced attention spans.)
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
Plus, these is that psylocybin is considered to be among the safest recreational drugs.
https://www.theguardian.com/so...
https://www.globaldrugsurvey.c...
Disclaimer: I'm aware that the globaldrugsurvey's methodology and conclusions has major, almost stupid problems, but their raw data does suggest that that the mushrooms are fairly safe.
Producing it via this method is not at all required to start using it therapeutically. The only reason they are going to such great lengths is so they can patent it and have monopoly "rights".
More proof that our perverse "intellectual property" system is precisely what is making the perverse outcomes.
Generally speaking, psychedelics aren't the best choice for hiding from reality. You are likely to end up with a heavy dosage of reality, possibly more than you feel you can handle. Now, alcohol and opiates, those will let you hide from reality.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
And those hippie drug fiends are today around 70. Why not ask granny about those trips she went on?.
Psilocybin is a small achiral molecule which is easy to prepare synthetically. (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/np030059u). If we wanted to use it medicinally, the availability of the molecule would not be the limiting factor.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Eschericia coli, as it is properly named, is a bacterium: a prokaryote, whereas yeast is a fungus: a eukaryote, which is massively more complicated. Eukaryotes are symbiotic organisms - they seem to have arisen from a symbiosis between archaea and bacteria; the nucleus seems more archaean, whereas mitchondria resemble bacteria. We still only know very little about the details of how it happened - we only know it happened at least twice, since plants have chloroplasts in addition to their mitochondria; those seem to be a kind of cyanobacteria.
E. coli is also a normal lower intestinal symbiont.
Adding these genes to e. coli, and then shooting them up somebody's butt, would essentially make them high as a kite 24/7.
That was the first thought I had actually-- thinking about people grabbing at invisible objects, and laughing hysterically, because they have the psilocybin equivalent of auto-brewery disorder.
As far as complexity of drug-like molecules is concerned, Psilocybin is really a trivial molecule where large-scale manufacturing in mushrooms or GM-yeast/bacteria would be waste of money. The paper identifies the reaction sequence and the involved enzymes, which is certainly interesting, but as absolutely ZERO applicability to any type of medical-grade commercial production.
My guess is that the submitter/editor refers to the lack of online papers.
No, TFA alludes to the 60s being a decade of hallucinogenic drug exploration.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
Tryptophan isn't "wrongly" said to make you sleepy - it does make you sleepy. The myth is that it's tryptophan to blame when Americans get sleepy after a Thanksgiving feast, when in reality most of the blame lies on the mass consumption of carbohydrates. Turkey is no more tryptophan-rich than many other meats, such as chicken.
Ever since, I've been suspicious of Jesus and very careful around chlorine.
At least we'll then know what drugs it takes to find ads enjoyable.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It has been nearly 20 years but shrooms turned me into the best possible movie audience member. I totally got whatever a director intended emotionally. Don'the ask me to put a caveat on it - shrooms were universally awesome for me. I absolutely understand why they would have therapeutic value.
... if those modified E. Coli bacteria were ever released and came to populate the guts of certain mammals.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
I have honestly been surprised that cloning the genes into E. coli or yeast for various illicit substances hasn't become widespread already. Whenever I see those articles about people "biohacking" in their garage to figure out whatever genetic illness their kid has I keep waiting to see a followup where they fund the treatment for their kid with a big fermenter full of THC.
That's the last time it was easy to do research on most recreational drugs. Psilocybin was marked Schedule 1 in 1970, after which research became quite difficult.
... There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Probably because it's pretty hard. Even with modern day chemistry sets, gene splicing isn't just cut and paste. Then you need to figure out what you just made and purify it. Requires a fairly sophisticated lab, not just a garage.
It's certainly doable. I have no doubt in certain wilder, less civilized parts of the world like Trenton, NJ (or most anyplace in New Jersey for that matter) someone is trying to do this but it's not easy.
And doing this on an industrial scale is even harder. OTOH, grown P. cubensis from spores in the darkroom of the SEM lab as an undergraduate was pretty easy.
I miss the '70's....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Wait? Who said it wasn't [released in the wild and colonizing peoples' guts, sending them on a permanent psychedelic experience] palready???
Maybe that would explain the political situation of the last few years. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
We can't stop here! This is bat country!
reproducing psilocybin is way, WAAY easier than reproducing cannabis in bacteria. I say cannabis and not "THC" because while THC has been reproduced in a chemical laboratory, there are about 12 different variants, and hundreds of other terpenes and cannabinoids in the cannabis plant that are unidentified, chemical reproduction procedures are unknown, and how they interact with THC and the human brain are mostly unkown. psilocybin is basically just one chemical, while the cannabis plant is dozens of different chemicals, and different strains produce different combinations that effect humans differently. This is why some strains of weed give people energy and focus, while other strains cause 'couch lock' making a user feel sedated, pain-free and want to sit down and listen to music :) Some strains cause the 'munchies' and are very effective at relieving nausea, while others are not. How these mechanisms work and how they can be reproduced in a laboratory is mostly unknown. Every single cannabis plant is basically a miniature chemical producing facility so trying to get this to work with E. coli is a lot more complicated than you might think.
just using straight up THC is undesirable for many medical patients and even recreational users
SOURCE: I've been living in Colorado for 2 years