Scientists Finally Unlock the Recipe For Magic Mushrooms (gizmodo.com) 132
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? (Score:2)
A 1968 paper (obviously it was in 1968)
Sorry, but why is this obvious? Just redundant text or is there another reason?
Re:1968? (Score:5, Informative)
1968, one year before Woodstock [wikipedia.org].
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1968, one year before Woodstock.
And one year after the Summer of Love [wikipedia.org]
Re: 1968? (Score:2)
And those hippie drug fiends are today around 70. Why not ask granny about those trips [youtube.com] she went on?.
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Yeah, even the CIA ain't what it used to be. Today they only use drugs to fund their projects instead of doing the right thing and giving them out to the people for free.
Re:1968? (Score:5, Interesting)
... 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
Re: 1968? (Score:2, Funny)
We can't stop here! This is bat country!
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May 1968 is a very significant date in France, marked by the youth protesting against authority.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I'm not sure how it relates to a German paper though.
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It has the same significance in Germany and for the very same reason.
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Here [youtube.com] is an ad for a certain German cola brand from 1968. Tell me this has nothing to do with psychodelics, I dare you.
Re: 1968? (Score:2)
My guess is that the submitter/editor refers to the lack of online papers.
Re: 1968? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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In Sweden the concept of the "68th left" is a thing.
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
1968 just happen to be a symbol of that movement which started around then and started to vanish away around 1976.
So it's just a left reference which by extension I guess may be a hippie reference which by extension would be a drug user reference. Kinda connected, but not head on :) ;D)
(Well, unless you consider drugs a necessity to be left
Re:1968? (Score:4, Informative)
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Reality sucks, so why not augment it?
VR + shrooms (Score:2)
. . . in a sensory deprivation tank!
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At least we'll then know what drugs it takes to find ads enjoyable.
Re:I'm not a coward I will test it (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Timothy Leary's Dead (Score:5, Funny)
No, no, no, no, He's outside looking in.
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Or is he inside, looking out?
Who knows what listening to 'ein kleine nachtmusik' too many times whilst on psychedelics might do...
I wonder... (Score:2)
If they release this E. coli variant into the wild, will people start getting high when they catch it?
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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-)
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Re:I wonder... (Score:4, Interesting)
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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. cuben
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Re: I wonder... (Score:1)
Woo hoo! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.)
Re:Woo hoo! (Score:5, Interesting)
It's also proven very effective at drastically reducing the frequency of migraine and cluster headaches.
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Migraines and cluster headaches come from either tightening of blood vessels, high blood pressure due to being overweight (extra fat narrows blood vessels), or toxins in the blood stream. Sometimes eating out at somewhere different (friends house/party, cultural restaurant never been before). Could be different food proteins or biogenome. So it would seem relaxing blood vessels and allowing them to expand would reduce the pain.
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I'm not sure where you got that, but none of it is actually true of migraine or cluster headaches.
There are headaches associated with blood pressure problems but they are not migraine or cluster headaches.
Re:Woo hoo! (Score:5, Funny)
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.)
tl;dr
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The very best drug experience of my life was with mushrooms. That was over twenty years ago. I've never sought them out since, but I probably should. I felt so much clarity about life and the "universe". The positive mood probably lasted at least 6 months after that experience. I would use them again to try and cure the depression, etc, but I don't know where to get them now. My friends from 20's era are on to other things. I am definitely interested in micro-doses as anti-depressant. Fucking govern
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You can probably order spores of Psilocybe species by mail, possibly legally. Depending on where you are, the illegality usually comes when you grow the spores, which is easy to do with little equipment or effort; the key is to keep everything sterile so other fungi don't get a toehold.
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It's not _that_ easy. If ergot fungus gets into the mix, it won't necessarily kill the mushrooms, but will make you sick as a dog or possibly kill you.
Once you've grown the mycelium, growing the mushrooms is easy though.
The market has pretty much solved the problem IMHO.
Re:Woo hoo! (Score:5, Insightful)
Purely political alas.
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true, but you can then only patent the improvement, which (if people pay for this) needs to be substantial. The patent will not strip you of the ability to use the unmodified product.
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Yeah, but lets face it. While it was fun when we were young, sneaking into a farmer's cow field, avoiding the bull, the angry cows, and the angry farmer gets kinda old after a while.
Not only that, but many/most farmers in my area use the anitbiotics, etc. in feed which kills 'shroom production.
Of course, if you do get some, you can always set up some brown rice and add the spores adn grow your own in a shit free environment....
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Organic brown rice flour mixed with vermiculite, to be exact. Plus a pressure cooker to sterilize everything beforehand and a rig, built by cannibalizing an ultrasonic humidifier plus a few stages of precipitators built from 2L Coke bottles and plastic tubing, to maintain the ideal moisture level.
Not that I would ever do such a thing, of course.
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Patents aside, clawing a drug back off of the DEA schedules (especially schedule I) is pretty much impossible and synthesizing a new compound is an easier prospect. For example, MDMA showed great promise in actual clinical studies for treating PTSD and was kept on schedule I (no medical use) against the advice of the entire medical community. The DEA does not like psychedelics at all.
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Making it from mushrooms, in an industrial setting is almost free per dose.
http://www.growmagicmushrooms.co.uk/grow_mushrooms.htm as an example, was a kit for making magic mushrooms that would do around a kilo (125 doses) for $40. ($0.30)
In an industrial setting, growing them, they are a tiny fraction of this price.
It's not being done so they can be sold for 0.1 cent, not 3 cents per dose.
It's being done so they can be sold for >>$100, not 3 cents per dose.
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PMS may be a cultural symptom, not a biological one. [slate.com]
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PMS may be a cultural symptom, not a biological one. [slate.com]
I'll re-emphasize the bold text in that article: Just because something is a social construction does not mean we don’t experience it.
If you have a problem and it's affecting your life enough that you feel you need a cure, then the causes are immaterial except where they're related to the cure. In this particular case, good luck coming up with a societal and psychological cure for PMS.
Also, if you're thinking it's an anglo issue, you jumped the gun. PMS is a thing in China, though I don't know about t
Into E. COLI!? (Score:1)
What the fuck is wrong with you people!? Splice it into brewer's yeast, not the fucking plague.
Re:Into E. COLI!? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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That is actually pretty scary. Imagine all children being given this at birth in a small enough dose that it doesn't make them trip out. So now they have a permanent colony of these things and due to the tolerance will never be able to enjoy mushroom tripping again.
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That is actually pretty scary. Imagine all children being given this at birth in a small enough dose that it doesn't make them trip out. So now they have a permanent colony of these things and due to the tolerance will never be able to enjoy mushroom tripping again.
Think about all the times in the past it has happened naturally and will never realize it because this has alreayd happened. How may drugs are coursing through our system that we have developed permanent immunity to?
Re:Into E. COLI!? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
and probably safe (Score:5, Interesting)
Plus, these is that psylocybin is considered to be among the safest recreational drugs.
https://www.theguardian.com/so... [theguardian.com]
https://www.globaldrugsurvey.c... [globaldrugsurvey.com]
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.
It might be safe (Score:2)
but unless you're mentally prepared for a full trip you'd better to just stick to say 1/2 gram of shrooms and have similar to weed high but less body/head stone and more of a semi mild perception high.
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Sadly that doesn't explain all that much to me anyway since I haven't taken cannabis either.
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Headaches go away (so... between may and December I am migraine-free when I go foraging and eat on the spot), aromas and taste and colors become more intense. at 5g the room is spinning and I feel agitated- creeping malaise (creepy-crawly feeling) but stuff like grass and trees and woodgrain look like they're fluid. I invariably puke though - my stomach does not agree with shrooms. Totally worth it though - far better than suffering through 3+ migraines a week with occasional cluster headaches in between. I
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I go foraging and eat on the spot),
How do you tell the difference? I've had mushrooms a couple of times, good high, no ill-effects, but I can't get past the fact that other mushrooms that look the same can kill you. It's an awful lot of trust if you're relying on someone else to pick them for you (and don't know what to look for yourself).
not at all required (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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".
We already know how to produce it synthetically, so I doubt it is only about patenting the method; it is simply curiosity driven research into how a living organism produces a molecule. This is in itself valuable knowledge - many chemical pathways in biology are similar at least in parts, although they lead to wildly different end products.
No breakthrough here (Score:3)
Yup, summary hype misguided (Score:3)
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.
Next up... (Score:2)
Next on scientists' list: the ingredients to the eleven secret herbs and spices!
human logic: (Score:1)
Lets make magic mushrooms illegal so we could sell medicine
Challenging science (Score:2)
Tryptophan (Score:5, Insightful)
Tryptophan isn't "wrongly" said to make you sleepy - it does [nih.gov] 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.
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Yeah, that one drives me crazy. "Sure, I ate 5000 calories, but the reason I'm sleepy is because of the turkey, which I ate in amounts only slightly larger than what I'd put in a sandwich on a normal day." Then there's other things, like the frequent drinking, the all-day activity, the travel, the time with relatives, all of which might make a person sleepy, depending.
All I Remember About Shrooms... (Score:4, Interesting)
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 wonder what would happen (Score:3)
... if those modified E. Coli bacteria were ever released and came to populate the guts of certain mammals.
I'll take it. (Score:2)
Mapping the biological factory? (Score:1)
"Actually making psilocybin requires mapping the biological factory."
Why do people write about a topic where they know so little, that statements like this don't immediately jump out at them as bullshit?
4-HO-DMT is just one of a varied family of tryptamines that is trivial to synthesise, as many Chinese 'research chemical' suppliers know full well.
And if you -really- want to phosphorylate psilocin into psilocybin, it's not that hard either, though nobody bothers because it'll be immediately oxidised back in
I prefer magic mushrooms to LSD (Score:2)
Have not done either for decades, but pretty sure my preference would still stand today.
Simple DIY formula (Score:1)
Just mix ammonia and bleach.
Dubious Medical Value (Score:1)
Not sure what kind of value we can get from this kind of hallucinogen. We have known about magic mushrooms since prehistoric times, and there was major experimentation with them in the 60s, but nothing good came of it, and aside from synesthesia and what amounts to waking dreams that you can't get out of, these things aren't useful to humanity in any real way.
Probably one of the reasons that it took from 1968 to 2017 for someone to figure out how to synthesize the drug.
Drugs... (Score:2)
Drugs we don't make and sell for 1000x profit are bad mmmkay? Mushrooms are evil. Now that we've figured out how to make them in our lab they are good though, and you should buy them from us. Only us.
Why? Is this a step toward mind control? (Score:1)
It's probably much cheaper to grow them rather than go thru a tedious synthesis.
And, isn't E.Coli bad for humans?
I am thinking this is a step toward engineering a (tool) to control humans.
actively change ... (Score:1)