Tripping Me Out — Genetically Engineered Psychedelics
🧪🌿 The Franken-Plant That Makes Five Psychedelics at Once Hey there, You know those sci-fi stories where mad scientists brew something wild in a lab? This one just stepped out of the pages of Science Advances and into reality. A team at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science (led by Asaph Aharoni and Paula Berman) has genetically engineered a tobacco relative— Nicotiana benthamiana , the trusty lab workhorse of plant biology—to simultaneously produce five powerful psychedelic tryptamines : DMT (the “spirit molecule” from ayahuasca plants) Psilocybin and its active form psilocin (from magic mushrooms) Bufotenin and 5-MeO-DMT (compounds linked to the Sonoran Desert toad) They did it by reconstructing biosynthetic pathways from three different kingdoms of life—plants, fungi, and animals—then inserting nine key genes into the tobacco plant using a technique called agroinfiltration . A bacterium delivers the genes tem...