Hopefully every potential reader knows I could never ask you to collect mushrooms on my behalf. The penalties for citizen scientists are severe for possessing psilocybin.
Thank you to those who have sent me spore prints from their own incidental private research or while collecting for herbaria. These high-res images of basidiospores of Psilocybe cubensis are for your personal use (available here). The University of Queensland covers my salary four days a week as a research fellow. We have applied to Advance Queensland, the Australian Biological Resources Study and the Hermon Slade Foundation, but our applications have not been persuasive to fund any research on magic mushrooms. Specimen collection is a huge bottleneck for the project because I don't have resources to travel, and I really appreciate spore contributions to help increase our potential sampling. The data I have acquired and resources I use are funded creatively and on the cheap through my other research projects in plant pathology. For those enthusiastic to provide material, any culture made is lodged in the Queensland Plant Pathology Herbarium with the collector's name (if they are willing). My vision is that if a culture from a citizen scientist is used commercially, there will be a benefit sharing agreement with either the collector or land holder. I won't be the one to commercialise mushrooms, and who knows how far down the track this would be... but you never know. (Interestingly, not a single one of the >24,000 cultures in the Herbarium has been commercialised, maybe these will be a first). Thank you to everyone who has sent me photographs of Psilocybe cubensis fruiting after these November rains. It's fantastic to see the excitement, and hopefully we can answer whether this mushroom is native, or if introduced (which we suspect), how many times it has escaped.
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Round two submitting samples to AGRF. First attempt directly from agar and stored in >95% ethanol for a month or two did not yield DNA. This time I've grown cultures in liquid (PD broth) for two weeks and submitted to AGRF. We should have some feedback for this approach next week... I'm already optimistic. We've submitted seven haploid cultures of P. subaeruginosa and three of P. cubensis. Plenty of P. cubensis around southeast Queensland at the moment. We're starting to exhaust our sampling locally and it will be time to move further afield. The aim of this part of the project is to determine whether gold tops are introduced, and if yes, how many times. We suspect it is an introduction and will sequence about 50 genomes from 10 or more locations (separated by ≥ 100 kms). If we observe high genetic diversity, we will need to re-think our sampling.
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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
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