Student Discovers Long-Awaited Mystery Fungus Sought By LSD's Inventor

LSD "is used to treat conditions like depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction," notes Science Daily. And now a microbiology student "has found a long sought-after fungus that produces effects similar to the semisynthetic drug..." Morning glory plants live in symbiosis with fungi that produce the same ergot alkaloids the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann modified when he invented LSD in the late 1930s. Hofmann hypothesized that a fungus in morning glories produced alkaloids similar to those in LSD, but the species remained a mystery...

The researchers dubbed the fungus "Periglandula clandestina" for its ability to have eluded investigators for decades.

In the sink?

[pipatron]

A typical student's kitchen must be good hunting grounds for a microbiologist!

Re:In the sink?

[Krishnoid]

A lab bench [pbs.org] in one case, but no kidding.

Re:

[ihavesaxwithcollies]

Thanks. That was a great article about penicillin. It sucks that orangeutan is trying to destroy PBS.

Re:

[Tim the Gecko]

PBS has some great science content. Fascinating Fails [youtube.com] is a really good series about a range of discoveries. As well as an episode on penicillin (Fleming may have jazzed up the origin story) there is an interesting episode on ergot and LSD.

Re:

[skam240]

...And this is all going on my "to watch" list.

PBS is amazing and cutting off funding to it is a shameful act when one considers how little we spend on it.

Time to pick up gardening.

[JamesTRexx]

n/t

"Mornings Glory Seeds"

[newbie_fantod]

Mentioned in Abby Hoffman's Steal This Book , in the Free Drugs chapter - so there was some truth that you could get high from them.

Invention or Discovery

[Dr. Tom]

He didn't really "invent" it. He spilled it on his hand by accident

Re:

[careysub]

He didn't really "invent" it. He spilled it on his hand by accident

Albert Hoffman was an extremely skilled synthetic chemist and he not only invented the techniqes used to produce lysergic acid derivatives, he synthesized a large number of them himself.

While working with the 25th dialkyl derivative of lysergic acid that he had prepared, LSD-25 (it was the diethyl derivative), he became the first person to be intoxicated by it, but how he managed to ingest it (probably about 25 micrograms) has never been determined. The procedures he used should have protected him from expo

Re: Invention or Discovery

[Zero__Kelvin]

Most of your information is correct, but there is no mystery as to how he tripped or the quantity. He took the LSD off of the shelf it had been sitting on for 5 years, and ate what he thought was a small dose ... 500 micrograms IIRC. It was fast more than 25 mics. You can easily conclude that if you read his book or the diary entries of his bicycle ride when tripping.

Morning Glories Were a Puzzle

[careysub]

After the isolation and identification of the ergot alkaloids from the ergot fungi in the early 20th century the discovery of these same complex and delicate chemical structures in the Convolvulaceae (morning glories) was quite a surprise as they appeared to have evolved no where else in any of the plant kingdom (or elsewhere in the fungal kingdom for that matter).

So the theory was proposed that this was the result of a fungus that had long ago become an obligate parasite or endosymbiont in that plant famil

Re:

[careysub]

Reading the paper's abstract (can't get the full article yet), not just the press release, I see that this is NOT the first time that an ergot producing fungus had been recovered from morning glory seeds, despite what the misleading headline would have us believe. This was the third such recovery from a morning glory species, and as we expect from co-evolution each is a different fungal species. Now we need to get the A. nervosa fungus isolated!

I had a morning glory, too.

[devslash0]

This morning when I woke up. 8====D