Magic mushrooms have been used for thousands of years in traditional ceremonies and for recreational purposes. However, a new study has shown that mushrooms developed the ability to make the same psychoactive substance twice. The discovery has important implications for both our understanding of the role of these mushrooms in nature and their medical potential.
Magic mushrooms produce psilocybin, which converts your body into its active form, psilocin, when you take it. Psilocybin rose in popularity in the 1960s and was eventually classified as a schedule 1 -Medicijn in the US in 1970, and as a class A Medicine in 1971 in the United Kingdom, the instructions of drugs that have a great potential for abuse and have no accepted medical use. This has stopped the medical use of psilocybin for decades.
But recent clinical studies have shown that psilocybin can reduce the severity of depression, suicide thoughts and chronic anxiety. Given the potential for medical treatments, there is renewed interest to understand how psilocybin is made in nature and how we can produce it sustainably.
The new study, led by pharmaceutical microbiology researcher Dirk Hoffmeister, by Friedrich Schiller University Jena, discovered that mushrooms can make psilocybin in two different ways, using different types of enzymes. This also helped the researchers to discover a new way to turn psilocybin into a laboratory.
Based on the work under the leadership of Hoffmeister, enzymes from two types do not seem to have evolved independently of each other and to take different routes to create exactly the same connection.
This is a process that is known as convergent evolution, which means that not -related living organisms are evolving two different ways to produce the same characteristic. An example is that of caffeine, where various plants, including coffee, tea, cocoa and guaraná, have independently developed the ability to produce the stimulating agent.
This is the first time that convergent evolution has been observed in two organisms that belong to the fungal kingdom. Interesting is that the two mushrooms in question have a very different lifestyle. Inocybe CorydalinaAlso known as the GreenFlush Fibrecap and the object of the Hoffmeister study, grows in conjunction with the roots of different types of trees. Psilocybe mushrooms, on the other hand, traditionally known as magical mushrooms, life of nutrients that they acquire by dissolving dead organic matter, such as rotting wood, grass, roots or manure.
