A hint to the end of my research career came the first time I met the Institute Director at QAAFI in November '22. He opened our online meeting with 'Hello, your work doesn't really fit in here does it?' Bare-chested, riding the unicorn of the TGA announcement in February '23, Chris Appleyard, the first person to legally grow magic mushrooms in Australia (to my knowledge), called me up and offerred me a job. A stroke of good fortune for yours truly. My role at Funky Fungus is in designer shrooms and we have approval to fruit mushrooms. This was something missing from my permission to work on shrooms at UQ. Chris has stocked the Funky Fungus library with all of the cultivars I've researched, and what a pleasure to finally get to see them in the flesh. Chris owned one of the properties where we first collected Psilocybe cubensis back when I began studying magic mushrooms (the Woodford specimens, specifically Delaney's Creek, if you want to see where they fit in the Australian population in the Manure Tour or posts below). Where's all this going? I'll keep the blog going because we have a research grant to characterise the concentration of psilocybin (and related tryptamines) of 100 genotypes in the FF library and to compare differences between growth treatments (such as blue light while pinning, degradation of psilocybin after harvest, mycelium vs mushroom, and whatever else we think of). I also thought I should explain the reasoning behind designer shrooms and why we're crossing different haplotypes. Here's a brief outline of the process: fruit cultivars, make haploid cultures, cross against Oz haplotypes, identify cool phenotypes and genotypes that produce high or different concentrations of tryptamines. Who knew I'd get to put all the knowledge we've found to good use! This figure illustrates heterozygosity and homozygosity across a genome. The density of homozygous (the big blocks of colour) and heterozygous (the sharp thin peaks) positions is plotted in 100,000 and 10,000 base pair windows across 13 chromosomes of Psilocybe cubensis. The genome of Penis Envy is incredibly homozygous, B+ a tad more heterozygous, and the Chitwan cultivar the most heterozygous of everything! You've heard me harp on about Penis Envy for ages. It's one of the most interesting cultivars to me because of very different alleles at the psilocybin locus compared to most other cubes (Treasure Coast is the other interesting cultivar), and P-envy is highly homozygous and will be pretty cool to cross against. The images below are some of the current crosses we've made over the last two months by getting haploids of a few cultivars (Amazonian, Costa Rica, Mazatapec, and Mexicana), and crossing them with a couple of Oz haplotypes. Really cool to see the different Oz haplotypes totally change the appearance of the mushroom. Now, we just need to determine how much of a bang they have for psilocybin and start crossing against Penis Envy and Treasure Coast, with an aim to have heterozygous alleles for psilocybin production and see how it effects the finished product.
4 Comments
Nada
11/5/2023 05:47:18 am
This is very exciting. I've been checking in on your blog for the last year or more and am thrilled with the recent entries, and what the work you're doing means for the future of research in this field. I am in the states and have been doing some limited amount of out- and backcrossing in attempts to reinvigorate some of these mangled genetic lines. I've looked around for a good email for you, but only see the .edu address and thought it may be inappropriate to email you there. I am very much interested in assisting this work in any way i can, if you're open to that. I know its a lot of work, so if you're ooen to making spores available, I'd be glad to cover any costs associated with the collection and shipment. Perhaps we could continue a discussion via email? Would love to connect. Thanks for all you're doing.
Reply
James
12/12/2023 09:27:12 pm
Just reading through your genetics stuff (for environmental science degree and keen interest in genetics myself)
Reply
James
12/12/2023 09:05:17 pm
Hey Alistair congratulations on your new employment. I sensed that this was not far away for you 😉
Reply
Alistair
12/14/2023 03:27:50 am
Hey James, I'll give you a bell soon and we can shoot the breeze about all these gems.
Reply
Leave a Reply. |
Designer Shrooms @ Funky Fungus on 1st July 2023
I started a gig at Funky Fungus as Chief Scientific Officer to make designer shrooms Our research on Psilocybe
|