Magie im Reagenzglas
Jenaer Pharmazeuten entwickeln zwei neue Wege zur Herstellung von halluzinogenem Psilocybin
Lange Zeit wagte sich niemand so recht an die Erforschung von Psilocybin - dem Molekül, das den Zauberpilzen ihre Magie verleiht. Aufgrund seiner bewusstseinserweiternden, halluzinogenen Wirkung bezog es in der Wissenschaft seit den 60er Jahren eher eine Randposition. Seit einigen Jahren floriert jedoch die Erforschung des Wirkstoffs wieder, denn klinische Studien in aller Welt belegen die lindernde Wirkung bei therapieresistenten, schweren Depressionserkrankungen. Grund genug für Prof. Dr. Dirk Hoffmeister von der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, sich genauer mit der Substanz zu befassen: Erst im vergangenen Jahr deckte er mit seinen Mitarbeitern die Prozesse auf, mit denen der Pilz Psilocybin produziert - und entwickelte seitdem mit Jenaer Kollegen gleich zwei alternative Herstellungsmöglichkeiten. Zwei Fachmagazine veröffentlichten nun die Ergebnisse.
"Zum einen ist es uns gelungen, Psilocybin im Reagenzglas biokatalytisch zu produzieren", erklärt Prof. Hoffmeister. "Durch die Einbindung eines Derivats der Aminosäure Tryptophan zu Beginn der ablaufenden chemischen Reaktionen konnten wir die Synthese deutlich verbessern. Dabei haben wir in vitro die gleichen Enzyme genutzt, die der Pilz auch natürlicherweise verwendet." Das Verfahren, das sowohl kostengünstig als auch einfach in der Umsetzung ist, publizierten Hoffmeister und drei Fachkollegen im Magazin "Chemistry - A European Journal" (DOI: 10.1002/chem.201801047).
Genextraktion lässt Schimmel zaubern
Gemeinsam mit der Nachwuchsgruppe von Dr. Vito Valiante vom Leibniz-Institut für Naturstoff-Forschung und Infektionsbiologie - Hans-Knöll-Institut (HKI) hat der Jenaer Mikrobiologe darüber hinaus einen anderen Weg beschritten: "Wir haben vier Gene aus dem Pilz Psilocybe cubensis, also einem Magic Mushroom, extrahiert und in den Schimmelpilz Aspergillus nidulans verpflanzt, der wissenschaftlich bereits sehr gut untersucht und gentechnisch leicht handhabbar ist. Dann haben wir überprüft, ob er beginnt, den Wirkstoff ebenfalls herzustellen."
Von der Produktivität des "Zauberschimmels" waren selbst die Wissenschaftler überrascht: "Die Ausbeuten sind erfreulich hoch. Ein Vorteil des Verfahrens ist dadurch die gute Skalierbarkeit, auch wenn wir für die Zukunft an große Mengen denken." In der aktuellen Ausgabe des Journals "Metabolic Engineering" beschreiben die Jenaer Wissenschaftler die komplexe genetische Modifizierung des Schimmels (DOI: 10.1016/j.ymben.2018.05.014). Für Dirk Hoffmeister ist die Entdeckung einmal mehr Beleg für die hervorragende Zusammenarbeit von Universität und außeruniversitären Institutionen wie dem HKI am Standort Jena: "Diese engen Kooperationen münden immer wieder in weitreichende Forschungsergebnisse. So macht Wissenschaft Freude."
Original-Publikationen:
Felix Blei et al. (2018): Biocatalytic Production of Psilocybin and Derivatives in Tryptophan Synthase-Enhanced Reactions, Chemistry - A European Journal, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ful ... .201801047.
Sandra Hoefgen et al. (2018): Facile assembly and fluorescence-based screening method for heterologous expression of biosynthetic pathways in fungi, Metabolic Engineering, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ymben.2018.05.014.
https://www.uni-jena.de/Forschungsmeldu ... ister.html
Fantastisch was diese deutschen Forscher geschafft haben. Solche Nachrichten flashen in Anbetracht der Tatsache, dass vor einigen Jahren noch nicht an illegalen Stoffen geforscht werden durfte.
Arkan
Nachrichten aus der Welt der Pilze
Re: Nachrichten aus der Welt der Pilze
Glückwunsch waagh, ihr werdet ja solangsam richtig fame mit eurer Arbeit 
Re: Nachrichten aus der Welt der Pilze
Vielen Dank 
Es ist grad auch noch eine Veröffentlichung im Review, es bleibt also spannend
Es ist grad auch noch eine Veröffentlichung im Review, es bleibt also spannend 
Re: Nachrichten aus der Welt der Pilze
This Parasite Drugs Its Hosts With the Psychedelic Chemical in Shrooms
It also makes their butts fall off.
Imagine emerging into the sun after 17 long years spent lying underground, only for your butt to fall off.
That ignominious fate regularly befalls America’s cicadas. These bugs spend their youth underground, feeding on roots. After 13 or 17 years of this, they synchronously erupt from the soil in plagues of biblical proportions for a few weeks of song and sex. But on their way out, some of them encounter the spores of a fungus called Massospora.
A week after these encounters, the hard panels of the cicadas’ abdomens slough off, revealing a strange white “plug.” That’s the fungus, which has grown throughout the insect, consumed its organs, and converted the rear third of its body into a mass of spores. The de-derriered insects go about their business as if nothing unusual has happened. And as they fly around, the spores rain down from their exposed backsides, landing on other cicadas and saturating the soil. “We call them flying saltshakers of death,” says Matt Kasson, who studies fungi at West Virginia University.
Massospora and its butt-eating powers were first discovered in the 19th century, but Kasson and his colleagues have only just shown that it has another secret: It doses its victims with mind-altering drugs. Perhaps that’s why “the cicadas walk around as if nothing’s wrong even though a third of their body has fallen off,” Kasson says.
To study these fungi, “you really have to be in the right place at the right time,” Kasson says. For him, the time was May 2016, when billions of periodical cicadas emerged throughout the northeastern United States. He and his colleagues collected around 150 of the unfortunate saltshakers. And a year later, a colleague supplemented this collection with infected banger-wing cicadas—a different species that emerges annually.
Greg Boyce, a member of Kasson’s team, looked at all the chemicals found in the white fungal plugs of the various cicadas. And to his shock, he found that the banger-wings were loaded with psilocybin—the potent hallucinogen found in magic mushrooms. “At first, I thought: There’s absolutely no way,” he says. “It seemed impossible.” After all, no one has ever detected psilocybin in anything other than mushrooms, and those fungi have been evolving separately from Massospora for around 900 million years.
The surprises didn’t stop there. “I remember looking over at Greg one night and he had a strange look on his face,” Kasson recalls. “He said, ‘Have you ever heard of cathinone?’” Kasson hadn’t, but a quick search revealed that it’s an amphetamine. It had never been found in a fungus before. Indeed, it was known only from the khat plant that has long been chewed by people from the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. But apparently, cathinone is also produced by Massaspora as it infects periodical cicadas.
The team took great pains to check that Massospora really does contain these unexpected drugs. They showed that the substances are found only in the infected cicadas and not in the uninfected ones. They found that the fungus has the right genes for making these chemicals, and contains the precursor substances that you’d expect.
And at some point during this work, it dawned on Kasson that he was working with illicit substances. Psilocybin, in particular, is a Schedule I drug, and researchers who study it need a permit from the Drug Enforcement Administration. “I thought: Oh, crap,” he says. “Then I thought: OH CRAP. The DEA is going to come in here, tase me, and confiscate my flying saltshakers.”
He sent them an email. “This is … interesting,” read the initial response. “You have to understand that this is not something we normally get emails about.” After some discussion, the agency decided that no permit was required, since the drug is found in such small quantities within the cicadas, and since Kasson had no plans for concentrating it.
I asked Kasson if it’s possible to get high by eating Massospora-infected cicadas. Surprisingly, he didn’t say no. “Based on the ones we looked at, it would probably take a dozen or more,” he said. But it’s possible that earlier in the infections, before the conspicuous saltshaker stage, the fungus might pump out higher concentrations of these chemicals. Why? Kasson suspects that the drugs help the fungus control its hosts.
Infected cicadas behave strangely. Despite their horrific injuries, males become hyperactive and hypersexual. They frenetically try to mate with anything they can find, including with other males. They’ll even mimic the wing-flicking signals of females to lure males toward them. None of this does them any good—their genitals have either been devoured by the fungus or have fallen off with the rest of their butts. Instead, this behavior only benefits the fungus, allowing its spores to find new hosts.
Kasson suspects that cathinone and psilocybin are responsible for at least some of these behaviors. “If I had a limb amputated, I probably wouldn’t have a lot of pep in my step,” he said. “But these cicadas do. Something is giving them a bit more energy. The amphetamine could explain that.”
Psilocybin’s role is harder to explain. The drug might make humans hallucinate, but no one knows if cicadas would similarly trip. There is, however, a theory that magic mushrooms evolved psilocybin to reduce the appetites of insects that might compete with them for decaying wood. Perhaps by suppressing the appetites of cicadas, Massospora nudges them away from foraging and toward incessant mating.
There are many parasitic fungi that manipulate the behavior of insect hosts, including the famous Ophiocordyceps fungi, which can turn ants into zombies. “There’s a lot of curiosity about how these fungi might actually manipulate behavior, and this is the first time that anyone has identified chemical compounds that could play that role,” says Kathryn Bushley from the University of Minnesota. “That’s really significant.”
The discovery opens up a lot of questions, says Corrie Moreau from the University of Chicago. What exactly do these drugs do to the cicadas? And, she wonders, “do other cicada-infecting fungi share these same molecules, or has each manipulating fungus evolved a unique compound to induce the desired behavior?”
“And maybe there are other players involved,” Kasson added. He pointed to another study, which I wrote about last week, in which a different fungus seems to use a virus to control the minds of flies. “We might think that it’s just a host and a fungus, but maybe it’s more complicated than that.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arc ... source=twb
It also makes their butts fall off.
Imagine emerging into the sun after 17 long years spent lying underground, only for your butt to fall off.
That ignominious fate regularly befalls America’s cicadas. These bugs spend their youth underground, feeding on roots. After 13 or 17 years of this, they synchronously erupt from the soil in plagues of biblical proportions for a few weeks of song and sex. But on their way out, some of them encounter the spores of a fungus called Massospora.
A week after these encounters, the hard panels of the cicadas’ abdomens slough off, revealing a strange white “plug.” That’s the fungus, which has grown throughout the insect, consumed its organs, and converted the rear third of its body into a mass of spores. The de-derriered insects go about their business as if nothing unusual has happened. And as they fly around, the spores rain down from their exposed backsides, landing on other cicadas and saturating the soil. “We call them flying saltshakers of death,” says Matt Kasson, who studies fungi at West Virginia University.
Massospora and its butt-eating powers were first discovered in the 19th century, but Kasson and his colleagues have only just shown that it has another secret: It doses its victims with mind-altering drugs. Perhaps that’s why “the cicadas walk around as if nothing’s wrong even though a third of their body has fallen off,” Kasson says.
To study these fungi, “you really have to be in the right place at the right time,” Kasson says. For him, the time was May 2016, when billions of periodical cicadas emerged throughout the northeastern United States. He and his colleagues collected around 150 of the unfortunate saltshakers. And a year later, a colleague supplemented this collection with infected banger-wing cicadas—a different species that emerges annually.
Greg Boyce, a member of Kasson’s team, looked at all the chemicals found in the white fungal plugs of the various cicadas. And to his shock, he found that the banger-wings were loaded with psilocybin—the potent hallucinogen found in magic mushrooms. “At first, I thought: There’s absolutely no way,” he says. “It seemed impossible.” After all, no one has ever detected psilocybin in anything other than mushrooms, and those fungi have been evolving separately from Massospora for around 900 million years.
The surprises didn’t stop there. “I remember looking over at Greg one night and he had a strange look on his face,” Kasson recalls. “He said, ‘Have you ever heard of cathinone?’” Kasson hadn’t, but a quick search revealed that it’s an amphetamine. It had never been found in a fungus before. Indeed, it was known only from the khat plant that has long been chewed by people from the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. But apparently, cathinone is also produced by Massaspora as it infects periodical cicadas.
The team took great pains to check that Massospora really does contain these unexpected drugs. They showed that the substances are found only in the infected cicadas and not in the uninfected ones. They found that the fungus has the right genes for making these chemicals, and contains the precursor substances that you’d expect.
And at some point during this work, it dawned on Kasson that he was working with illicit substances. Psilocybin, in particular, is a Schedule I drug, and researchers who study it need a permit from the Drug Enforcement Administration. “I thought: Oh, crap,” he says. “Then I thought: OH CRAP. The DEA is going to come in here, tase me, and confiscate my flying saltshakers.”
He sent them an email. “This is … interesting,” read the initial response. “You have to understand that this is not something we normally get emails about.” After some discussion, the agency decided that no permit was required, since the drug is found in such small quantities within the cicadas, and since Kasson had no plans for concentrating it.
I asked Kasson if it’s possible to get high by eating Massospora-infected cicadas. Surprisingly, he didn’t say no. “Based on the ones we looked at, it would probably take a dozen or more,” he said. But it’s possible that earlier in the infections, before the conspicuous saltshaker stage, the fungus might pump out higher concentrations of these chemicals. Why? Kasson suspects that the drugs help the fungus control its hosts.
Infected cicadas behave strangely. Despite their horrific injuries, males become hyperactive and hypersexual. They frenetically try to mate with anything they can find, including with other males. They’ll even mimic the wing-flicking signals of females to lure males toward them. None of this does them any good—their genitals have either been devoured by the fungus or have fallen off with the rest of their butts. Instead, this behavior only benefits the fungus, allowing its spores to find new hosts.
Kasson suspects that cathinone and psilocybin are responsible for at least some of these behaviors. “If I had a limb amputated, I probably wouldn’t have a lot of pep in my step,” he said. “But these cicadas do. Something is giving them a bit more energy. The amphetamine could explain that.”
Psilocybin’s role is harder to explain. The drug might make humans hallucinate, but no one knows if cicadas would similarly trip. There is, however, a theory that magic mushrooms evolved psilocybin to reduce the appetites of insects that might compete with them for decaying wood. Perhaps by suppressing the appetites of cicadas, Massospora nudges them away from foraging and toward incessant mating.
There are many parasitic fungi that manipulate the behavior of insect hosts, including the famous Ophiocordyceps fungi, which can turn ants into zombies. “There’s a lot of curiosity about how these fungi might actually manipulate behavior, and this is the first time that anyone has identified chemical compounds that could play that role,” says Kathryn Bushley from the University of Minnesota. “That’s really significant.”
The discovery opens up a lot of questions, says Corrie Moreau from the University of Chicago. What exactly do these drugs do to the cicadas? And, she wonders, “do other cicada-infecting fungi share these same molecules, or has each manipulating fungus evolved a unique compound to induce the desired behavior?”
“And maybe there are other players involved,” Kasson added. He pointed to another study, which I wrote about last week, in which a different fungus seems to use a virus to control the minds of flies. “We might think that it’s just a host and a fungus, but maybe it’s more complicated than that.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arc ... source=twb
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Ge'ez ጫት
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Mindlusion
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Re: Nachrichten aus der Welt der Pilze
Äusserst interessant. Brauche zwar noch ein Weilchen bis ich durch bin, aber es lohnt sich definitiv.Arkan hat geschrieben:https://stateoftheworldsfungi.org/
Hab eine geile Seite über Pilze gefunden.
Arkan
Re: Nachrichten aus der Welt der Pilze
Scientists Are Giving Magic Mushrooms To Religious Leaders
By Tom Hale
A priest, a rabbi, a nun, a Buddhist monk, and some magic mushrooms. Nope, it’s not the start of a joke, or the guest list to the weirdest party ever, it’s a new scientific study taking place in the US.
The study, taking place at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, has gathered dozens of religious leaders to investigate the effect of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, on spiritual experience.
Over 20 leaders from numerous faiths and traditions will receive a strong dose of psilocybin on two occasions in “living room-like setting” day-long contemplative sessions. A series of follow-up sessions and questionnaires will then be used to see whether their psychedelic experience altered their spiritual thinking and whether this changes the way they perceive their life and work as a religious leader.
They started looking for participants in early 2016 and now the study is underway, the Guardian reports. Unfortunately, they are yet to find a Muslim or Hindu spiritual leader who’s up for taking part.
“With psilocybin, these profound mystical experiences are quite common. It seemed like a no-brainer that they might be of interest, if not valuable, to clergy,” Dr William Richards, a psychologist involved in the study, told the Guardian.
“It's too early to talk about results, but generally people seem to be getting a deeper appreciation of their own religious heritage,” he added. “The dead dogma comes alive for them in a meaningful way. They discover they really believe this stuff they’re talking about.”
Previous scientific studies have looked into spirituality and magic mushrooms, however this is the first one to involve individuals of different religious faiths. Over the past few years, there have been increasingly more clinical trials investigating the effects of this drug, including a study last year that tested whether psilocybin could be used to treat depression.
One of the most famous experiments involved magic mushrooms' active psychedelic ingredient initiating "mystical experiences", known as the “Marsh Chapel Experiment” or "Good Friday Experiment", which took place in 1962. Under the supervision of counterculture icon and psychologist Timothy Leary, half of the participants received psilocybin, while a control group received a placebo-like drug. The results were the first empirical evidence to show that psilocybin generated experiences most people would define as “spiritually" significant.
Psilocybin is a naturally occurring psychedelic compound produced in more than 200 species of mushrooms. Reported effects of taking the drug include euphoria, vivid hallucinations, altered perception, psychological changes, and spiritual experiences. Despite its potent effects, it has a relatively low toxicity and is not associated with physical dependence.
Although it’s still relatively early days for the scientific research, it’s already been suggested as a possible treatment for a range of anxiety disorders and even cluster headaches.
https://www.iflscience.com/brain/scient ... s-leaders/
By Tom Hale
A priest, a rabbi, a nun, a Buddhist monk, and some magic mushrooms. Nope, it’s not the start of a joke, or the guest list to the weirdest party ever, it’s a new scientific study taking place in the US.
The study, taking place at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, has gathered dozens of religious leaders to investigate the effect of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, on spiritual experience.
Over 20 leaders from numerous faiths and traditions will receive a strong dose of psilocybin on two occasions in “living room-like setting” day-long contemplative sessions. A series of follow-up sessions and questionnaires will then be used to see whether their psychedelic experience altered their spiritual thinking and whether this changes the way they perceive their life and work as a religious leader.
They started looking for participants in early 2016 and now the study is underway, the Guardian reports. Unfortunately, they are yet to find a Muslim or Hindu spiritual leader who’s up for taking part.
“With psilocybin, these profound mystical experiences are quite common. It seemed like a no-brainer that they might be of interest, if not valuable, to clergy,” Dr William Richards, a psychologist involved in the study, told the Guardian.
“It's too early to talk about results, but generally people seem to be getting a deeper appreciation of their own religious heritage,” he added. “The dead dogma comes alive for them in a meaningful way. They discover they really believe this stuff they’re talking about.”
Previous scientific studies have looked into spirituality and magic mushrooms, however this is the first one to involve individuals of different religious faiths. Over the past few years, there have been increasingly more clinical trials investigating the effects of this drug, including a study last year that tested whether psilocybin could be used to treat depression.
One of the most famous experiments involved magic mushrooms' active psychedelic ingredient initiating "mystical experiences", known as the “Marsh Chapel Experiment” or "Good Friday Experiment", which took place in 1962. Under the supervision of counterculture icon and psychologist Timothy Leary, half of the participants received psilocybin, while a control group received a placebo-like drug. The results were the first empirical evidence to show that psilocybin generated experiences most people would define as “spiritually" significant.
Psilocybin is a naturally occurring psychedelic compound produced in more than 200 species of mushrooms. Reported effects of taking the drug include euphoria, vivid hallucinations, altered perception, psychological changes, and spiritual experiences. Despite its potent effects, it has a relatively low toxicity and is not associated with physical dependence.
Although it’s still relatively early days for the scientific research, it’s already been suggested as a possible treatment for a range of anxiety disorders and even cluster headaches.
https://www.iflscience.com/brain/scient ... s-leaders/
Du hast keine ausreichende Berechtigung, um die Dateianhänge dieses Beitrags anzusehen.
"The more you know, makes You realize you know nothing"...