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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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!