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Psilocybin Produced in Yeast
- msla 7y agoRealistically, I know this will be used to make pills. But the first thing I thought when I saw the headline was, "Wow. That's some interesting beer."
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- elil17 7y agoI mean it sounds like if you could get your hands on this yeast you could actually make psychedelic beer (or bread).
- hatsunearu 7y agoI think the method uses some special enzymes that can only be really be used with yeast. So yeast is just a supporting role in the operation and the enzyme is the star. They say they tried to get E. Coli to operate the enzyme (E. Coli is used often to make all kinds of drugs, like insulin) but it didn't work and got yeast to work with it.
- ncmncm 7y agoBy my reading the yeast does the whole job, short of purification, meaning getting the yeast, sugar, and alcohol out of it afterward. Why even a 50% loss of product would be debilitating is a mystery. It's not like the yeast collects a salary, or like sugar is expensive. The author doesn't seem to realize how little of the stuff is needed for a dose.
- tonyarkles 7y agoYour sibling comment said a yield of 600mg/L, and that a 30mg dose has psychoactive effects. Seems like that works out to 20 doses/L, which is a better yield than beer!
- awalton 7y agoThat's not quite the right read - the previous work (I'm not even sure if it was that lab) was to engineer e. coli to make psilocybin, but e. coli was a bad factory because it still needed a very expensive to make/obtain chemical added as a feedstock. So instead, they put the same genetic material into yeast which already had the necessary metabolic equipment to make the entire compound "de novo" (i.e. from scratch - just add sugar and yeast nutrients and it pumps out psilocybin). The downside is that the yeast's metabolic pathways chew up about half the product, so there is still work to do on making it more efficiently, but at yields of 600mg/L it's not exactly a bad start. (For reference, depression researchers tested the compound at dose of 30 mg for a 155lb man and it yielded psychoactive effects.)
- awalton 7y ago> But the first thing I thought when I saw the headline was, "Wow. That's some interesting beer." You know those researchers have already thought that one through. They've each probably got a brew going in their basements as we speak...
- erk__ 7y agoDenmark is in general pretty well known for doing stuff with yeast. The yeast used in most of the worlds lager beer are all "descendants" of a yeast cultivated by the beer company Carlsberg which have been distributed around the world. And the pharma company Nova were among the first to produce human insulin with yeast.
- mikeg8 7y ago> "It's unfeasible and way too expensive to extract psilocybin from magic mushrooms and the best chemical synthesis methods require expensive and difficult to source starting substrates...” This is one of those situations where I feel like we (humans) are approaching it all wrong. Why over complicate it by trying to “extract” the psilocybin instead of treating it like marijuana and growing the mushrooms in highly controlled settings and then testing for potency?! As someone who’s recently had very positive experiences with both large/small doses of magic mushrooms, it’s disheartening to see us remake the mistakes of the past by trying to over-engineer something from nature. IMO, the optimum approach would be to have humility and simply be stewards of this wonderful gift. There is no reason That psilocybin shouldn’t be administered in its most common form, as it has been for thousands of years, other than it would be harder to profit off of.
- smabie 7y agoAlso, since we already have 4-aco-dmt (which is virtually identical to psilocybin), so there's no real reason to extract.
- monktastic1 7y agoHaving had countless cubensis trips and a handful of 4-aco-dmt ones, I didn't find them very similar (and found the latter to be uniquely unpleasant). Perhaps I have weird chemistry, but I'm not alone. I would hate for others to miss out.
- rv-de 7y agoI would second this. It might be, though, because it is much easier to overdose 4-Aco-DMT than shrooms. Even most milligram scales don't reliably differentiate between 30 and 50 mg but the trip on the latter would be immensely more intense. 4-Aco-DMT seems also to be much closer to DMT than, say, LSD.
- undersuit 7y agoDosing is far easier in pill form regardless?
- scythe 7y agoPsilocybin may be an underrated chemical precursor. 4-substituted indoles are notoriously difficult to synthesize. Psilocin is a rare example of a natural one. (LSD is another.) For example, a milliliter of 4-bromoindole costs a whopping $75: https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/catalog/product/aldrich/524336?lang=en®ion=US https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/catalog/product/aldrich/524336?... Presumably this technique could produce psilocybin for much less than $75 per milliliter.
- derefr 7y agoAre you sure that these precursors aren't just expensive because so many of the compounds that go into them, or which come from them, are controlled substances? There are a lot of bulk reactants that I'd like to buy for chemistry experiments, but can't (because they're controlled, because they can be used to make illegal things), so I have to make them myself from even earlier precursor chemicals; this adds (via labor costs) to the cost of making the final product. Presumably, even big producers like Sigma are in the same situation.
- colechristensen 7y agoIf you're curious go search. Sigma sells cocaine, heroin, and LSD, for example, nevermind precursors. They won't sell them to you, but they will sell them to organizations with the correct permissions to buy them. Regulatory compliance might add to the cost, but for a company like Sigma I'd expect doing things in-house to lower costs not raise them.
- isoprophlex 7y agoBe careful thinking about potential cost of bringing a synthesis to market based on Sigma Aldrich catalog prices. SA is a supply house for research chemicals, prioritizing quantity of compounds offered and consistent, specified quality over price. The range of products they offer is insane, even considering the reactivity and instability of some of them. If your commercialize a compound, you source these starting materials (eg. Bromoindole) directly through manufacturers. You will be able to buy in bulk at 10-1000x lower prices, sometimes. Of course you need to do judicious quality controls yourself, but you likely have the scaling benefits to do.
- hatsunearu 7y agoIs that why flour is flying off the shelves right now? ;)
- andrew_xor_andy 7y ago> the best chemical synthesis methods require expensive and difficult to source starting substrates This type of thing always amazes me about nature -- obviously all the ingredients necessary exist in the soil the mushroom is grown in! Yet the best we can do to mimic nature is get some hard-to-acquire substrates. It's so interesting how, given enough time, the universe can produce a self-replicating organism that can do something with basic building blocks that we can't do with current technology... (okay, maybe this is a bit romantic, but it's still fun to think about)
- ralusek 7y ago> all the ingredients necessary exist in the soil the mushroom is grown in I can't speak for mushrooms, but for plants, the vast majority of the mass actually comes from carbon in the air (breathes in CO2, takes the carbon, breathes out O2) and obviously water.
- hammock 7y ago>Generally, plants make their food using the sun's energy (photosynthesis), while animals eat, then internally digest, their food. Fungi do neither: their mycelium grows into or around the food source, secretes enzymes that digest the food externally, and the mycelium then absorbs the digested nutrients. https://www.for.gov.bc.ca/hfp/publications/00029/mushwhat.htm https://www.for.gov.bc.ca/hfp/publications/00029/mushwhat.ht...
- vikramkr 7y agoThe mail innovation to come out of 4 billion years of natural selection are essentially just really really really good catalysists: enzymes. They've got an admirable specificity and efficiency. We dont have 4 billion years to figure out how to do it as well, but we've gotten not that terrible in just a few thousand!
- kfrzcode 7y agoConsciousness studies will be the next frontier and may bring our race further, faster, than space exploration. In my opinion.
- toxicFork 7y agoWe were the final frontier all along.
- ralusek 7y agoI've never once heard a bit of insight from a psychonaut that was particularly game-changing. We're all connected, consciousness is an illusion, societal structures are somewhat arbitrarily defined, etc. These are the existential thoughts of teenagers. Life is just energy, energy is just vibrations, everything is a fractal, etc, these are just the existential speculations of people making baseless claims. Consciousness as a useful frontier, in my opinion, will only have utility as it intersects with neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Producing consciousness with AI will be game-changing. Altering or affecting consciousness with neuroscience, or allowing consciousness to interact with neuroscience in such a way that interfaces with other technologies will be game-changing, sure. But giving people psychedelics and having them explore their own consciousnesses is not going to catalyze our society forward by leaps and bounds, that has been done since at least the 60s. I obviously don't care if people do whatever they'd like, I just don't see the point in romanticizing them.
- pharke 7y agoI think this is more or less obviously wrong. Imagine a primitive society inventing the microscope and then making it illegal, perhaps going so far as to make all types of lenses illegal even those used for eyeglasses. Now you might have small numbers of people willing to experiment with lenses and microscopy in secret but if the society wages a war on glass and actively persecutes and imprisons anyone involved in the lens business it's going to make it very difficult for anyone to make any progress and those that do are going to be people on the fringe with little ability to pursue their research or communicate it to others. It seems possible to me that psychedelics may be a form of "microscope for the mind" that makes clear details and inner workings that we were not able to see otherwise. It won't revolutionize our understanding over night since we would still need to build a science around it just as we did with the microscope when we discovered a world we had only inklings of before.
- 0x8BADF00D 7y agoIt looks like this would be used for large scale synthesis of psilocybin.
- collyw 7y agoPsylocibin is already synthetically available as I understand - its a pill they get in Johns Hopkins trails for smoking cessation. Anyone know how that is produced? Another point they make is about psylocin. As I understand, as soon as psylocibin hits your stomach acid it gets converted to psylocin anyway. People use lemon to do the process before ingesting in order for it to hit them faster.
- tuyiown 7y agoReminded me of a case of mass food poisoning related to bread making people delirious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1951_Pont-Saint-Esprit_mass_poisoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1951_Pont-Saint-Esprit_mass_po...
- jmkd 7y agoThere's a long history of pairing entheogenic substances with yeast and its bi-products. For around 1900 years a biannual event took place near Athens known as The Eleusinian Mysteries.[1] This was a real occurrence of which Plato, Socrates, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius and many others wrote about or attended in person. The event culminated in a secret ceremony in which participants invariably reported losing their fear of death [2] Much has been written on the topic, with growing speculation through the 20th century that the initiates took an entheogenic substance, such as psilocybin or ergotamine, from mushrooms, beer or barley. [3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleusinian_Mysteries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleusinian_Mysteries [2] https://www.ancient.eu/article/32/the-eleusinian-mysteries-the-rites-of-demeter/ https://www.ancient.eu/article/32/the-eleusinian-mysteries-t... [3] PDF https://www.mattioli1885journals.com/index.php/MedHistor/article/download/7443/7419 https://www.mattioli1885journals.com/index.php/MedHistor/art...
- IgorPartola 7y agoI think a lot of this discussion is missing the forest for the trees. Here we have people arguing whether it’s better to make powder out of these psychoactive mushrooms and use that as a drug vs extract pure psilocybin and use that as a drug. I know little of pharmacology but I can see one use of pure compounds: further research. Analyzing how psilocybin affects serotonin receptors could potentially help design other drugs that act on those receptors without psychedelic side effects. It could also help with creating other psilocybin analogs with different effects. And of course having the ability to study in detail the effects that other substances in the psychoactive mushrooms have might help identify other areas of study. As a software analogy, this is like the debate whether it’s better to have Google Maps vs mapping software and all the underlying data. Of course it’s better to have the latter even if some romanticize the former.
- mistermann 7y ago> Of course it’s better to have the latter All other things being equal.
- IgorPartola 7y agoHas OpenStreetMaps made Google Maps disappear?
- mistermann 7y agoI think we've had an unintended misunderstanding. >> As a software analogy, this is like the debate whether it’s better to have Google Maps vs mapping software and all the underlying data. Of course it’s better to have the latter even if some romanticize the former. > All other things being equal. More explicitly, my point is that this is only true if all(!) other variables were equal. A variable from TFA that has significant variance is cost. If you're in a hypothetical scenario of choosing between Google Maps (free, or nominal) vs mapping software and all the underlying data ($420 zillion), even though the latter product is preferable, the difference in that one variable could be a deal breaker. I have no idea what the actual numbers or other particulars are in the real world between OpenStreetMaps and Google Maps, but that they both exist suggests different customers have different requirements (and budgets), and choose the most appropriate technology accordingly.
- farco12 7y agoFor those interested, here is a link to the paper referenced in the article: https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S109671761930401X?token=61C81A51D67AF660DF1456874A2F7320ADE07D9BD4F7CC420E1779362DAF5E3834B3B8ED0608E029398AEE4BAE0E0214 https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S109671761930401X?...
- refurb 7y agoA few comments: - psilocybin is pretty easy to synthesize with the exception of the phosphorylation (can be hard to purify without degrading it) - this is a research publication, so of course they put their findings in the best possible light (“finally the synthesis everyone has been waiting for”)
- crusso 7y agoYeast is everywhere. I was recently reading about how to cultivate wild yeast in a jar left on your countertop for use in making sourdough bread. What happens when some of the yeast you capture in the environment is producing psilocybin? I saw no mention in the article of considerations to keep these genetic modifications contained within the psilocybin manufacturing process.
- tehjoker 7y agoGenerally, most genetic modifications like these are harmful to the competitiveness of the microorganism in the wild. It's possible that producing psilocybin could help it be more competitive, but this would be the exception rather than the rule. Generally, the organism expends so much energy and material producing the engineered substance that it's worse at doing other things.
- tehjoker 7y agoThe construction of the tripping factory.