Really impressive that a student managed to find something Hofmann suspected nearly a century ago. Makes you wonder how many of these hidden chemists are still quietly working in symbiosis with plants, carrying out complex metabolic processes we haven’t noticed yet.
It also makes me think about how much untapped potential might be hiding in the ordinary plants we pass by every day.
> The researchers prepared a DNA sample and sent it away for genome sequencing, funded by a WVU Davis College Student Enhancement Grant obtained by Hazel. The sequencing confirmed the discovery of a new species and the sequence is now deposited in a gene bank with her name on it.
> “Sequencing a genome is a significant thing,” Panaccione said. “It’s amazing for a student.”
Question - how is it significant, considering they sent it off to another company to do the sequencing?
I really appreciate the mature tone this article took towards the discussion of a psychedelic compound
> drug LSD, which is used to treat conditions like depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction.
Wait: I thought LSD is schedule 1, and there are no legally-sanctioned uses of it? Did something change while I was living under a rock? (Unlike MDMA, where there were legally-sanctioned experiments recently.)
It is know since a long time that morning glory seeds contain LSA.
Also LSA is different from LSD. While you can legally get the former it is (from my experience) way more dangerous than LSD.
>Still, some clinicians use them to treat conditions like migraines, dementia, uterine hemorrhaging and Parkinson’s disease.
I think it's more common to use synthetic derivatives of ergot alkaloids like ergonovine. But ergot itself is infamously difficult to cultivate. So it's no surprise that they have immediately started trying to culture this new fungus.
>> drug LSD, which is used to treat conditions like depression, post-traumatic stress disorder
LSD can cause PTSD. Dr K of the "Healthy Gamer" YT channel gives that as the reason people shouldn't do LSD in this next 8-min video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=So7hE1Ba_QA
The video is not about LSD or PTSD, so it would be nice if I could give a time index into where in the video Dr gives the warning, but sadly I don't have time right now.
Are clones available for research purposes?
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> drug LSD, which is used to treat conditions like depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction.
Umm, ok, sure thats what it's used for.
That one sentence just points to a large issue with the whole tone of this article. Clearly LSD is still a problem child.
While it's been known for many years that endosymbiotic fungi are responsible for producing the ergot alkaloids in the Morning Glory plant family, and the recent discovery here is the identification of the host-specific fungal symbiont for the common decorative flower Ipomoea tricolor, this plant-fungus relationship was not known in the days of Albert Hoffman's research.
He is most famous for synthesizing and experiencing the effects of LSD from ergot-derived alkaloids; ergot is a fungal pathogen that grows on grain plants. He then identified psilocybin as the active psychoactive component of magic mushroom samples from Mexico.
When he turned his work to identifying the active component in Morning Glory plants, he presented his work showing that he'd discovered LSA, another ergot alkaloid. Other researchers accused him of having contaminated samples, because he'd found in plants compounds which were known only from the fungi kingdom. Hoffman's work was vindicated, in a sense, when the relationship of endosybiotic fungi (cryptic fungi which spend the majority of their lifecycle inside a plant) was later elucidated.