Scientists Create the Most Psychedelic Plant Ever

Scientists Create the Most Psychedelic Plant Ever

In the last decade, there’s been an increasing openness both culturally and medically about the therapeutic uses of psychedelic drugs to address mental health issues. Psychedelics have been used by everyone from professional athletes to people experiencing PTSD; recently, journalist Robert Draper chronicled his experiences with ibogaine for The New York Times Magazine. Getting different psychedelics can require very different methods of farming.…

One Plant, Five Psychedelics: Inside the Bioengineering Breakthrough That Has Big Pharma and Regulators Watching

A team of scientists has engineered a single tobacco plant to simultaneously produce five different psychedelic compounds — psilocybin, psilocin, baeocystin, norbaeocystin, and aeruginascin — in quantities that could upend how these substances are manufactured for clinical use. The achievement, published in the journal Nature Chemical Biology, represents the most complex reconstruction of a psychedelic biosynthetic pathway in a plant host to dat…

Scientists Engineered a Plant To Produce 5 Different Psychedelics At Once

Plants, toads, and mushrooms "can all produce psychedelic substances," writes ScienceAlert. "And now their powers have been combined in one plant." [S]cientists have taken the genes these organisms use to make five natural psychedelics and introduced them into a tobacco plant ( Nicotiana bentha...