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cube talk said:
so many silly posts in here

how about this theory, just like a tangerine tree makes tangerines mushrooms make their own versions. Tangerines are good for you it just so happens, and the same can be said for mushrooms.

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OutsideOfMyMind said:
Psilocybin is a tryptamine. It's chemically structured similarly to tryptophan, an amino acid, which helps to produce serotonin and melatonin. These are both responsible for consciousness and perception. I think psilocybin and other hallucinogenic tryptamines like dmt, are amino acids for CONSCIOUSNESS. Building blocks of consciousness. If tryptophan is an amino acid, a building block for physical life, then psilocybin and other tryptamines are amino acids for consciousness and the spiritual realm.

So I think hallucinogenic tryptamines are amino acids for our minds, our bodies don't produce them naturally, so we get them from fungi.

Can someone go a little bit deeper with this thought?

I can't remember who but someone theorized that dmt and tryptamines are the universal "consciousness molecule" that all living beings and entities share in common.

Update: wow I just realized this thread is super old.

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I'll bite.

There is speculation that endogenous DMT serves that purpose but the experiments to demonstrate it on humans are prohibited.  So there's that...

Hallucinogenic tryptamines are widespread in natural substances, not just mushrooms.  Mushrooms are special in that you don't need to do any preparation to extract the alkaloids - just eat them.  And they don't have terrible side effects due to related compounds, mostly.

But the idea that the mushroom evolved them for our consumption is unsupportable.  Psilocybes date back about 50 million years according to current research.  https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130806132852.htm

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Using new molecular and computational techniques, the team has produced the first multi-gene evaluation of the evolutionary development of Psilocybe, which constitutes a major step in classifying and naming "magic" mushrooms. Earlier work showed that species of Psilocybe did not commonly descend from a single ancestor. As a result, the hallucinogenic species (the genus Psilocybe) were typically separated from their non-hallucinogenic relatives (the genus Deconica). But this new work now places the two separate monophyletic -- meaning developed from a single ancestor -- groups into different families. Within Psilocybe (family Hymenogastraceae) and Deconica (family Strophariaceae s.str), the authors have discovered several strong infrageneric relationships.

According to the authors, their analysis of various morphological traits of the mushrooms suggests that these typically weren't acquired through a most recent common ancestor and must have evolved independently or undergone several evolutionary losses, probably for ecological reasons. Nevertheless, species of Psilocybe are united to some degree because they have the psychedelic compound psilocybin and other secondary metabolites, or products of metabolism. The authors say that former Psilocybe species that lack these secondary metabolites could also be found in Deconica.

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Impact Statement
The rate of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) between species of microorganisms is thought to be higher for genes located in gene clusters, which often encode all of the enzymatic, regulatory, and transport‐related steps required for a metabolic pathway to function in a single genomic locus. Such clusters may enhance the evolvability of fungi by facilitating the rapid loss or gain of multigene traits such as the production of bioactive molecules. Although developmentally complex mushroom‐forming fungi are thought to experience little HGT compared with morphologically simpler fungi, a scattered distribution of the hallucinogenic molecule psilocybin among diverse “magic” mushrooms led us to hypothesize that its biosynthetic pathway has been dispersed by HGT of a gene cluster. To test our hypothesis, we sequenced the genomes of three distantly related hallucinogenic mushroom species for comparison with closely related, nonhallucinogenic species. We identified a homologous multigene cluster in each hallucinogenic species by searching for clustering among all genes with a psilocybin‐like distribution among mushroom species. The enzymatic functions of genes within this cluster were confirmed here and in another concurrent study, and phylogenetic analyses support HGT of the cluster between divergent dung decomposers in the genera Psilocybe and Panaeolus, a first for mushroom‐forming fungi. Bioactive molecules like psilocybin are often presumed to have niche‐specific roles, but the ecological contexts in which they evolved are rarely known. We found that distantly related dung‐ and wood‐decay fungi have less variation in their genome content compared to close relatives in alternative niches, suggesting that this content is shaped in part by shared ecological pressures. Coupled with the inheritance patterns of the psilocybin cluster, these data support the hypothesis that psilocybin production is part of a larger adaptive strategy to dung and late wood‐decay niches, which harbor abundant invertebrates that eat or compete with fungi. We speculate that neuroactive compounds like psilocybin that target broadly conserved neurotransmitter receptors may have evolved as a strategy to influence arthropod activity in these niches, and that fungi within these niches could be further sources of neuroactive molecules.

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Secondary metabolites are small molecules that are widely employed in defense, competition, and signaling among organisms (Raguso et al. 2015). Due to their physiological activities, secondary metabolites have been adopted by both ancient and modern human societies as medical, spiritual, or recreational drugs. Psilocin is a psychoactive agonist of the serotonin (5‐hydroxytryptamine, 5‐HT) ‐2A receptor (Halberstadt and Geyer 2011) and is produced as the phosphorylated prodrug psilocybin by a restricted number of phylogenetically disjunct mushroom forming families of the Agaricales (Bolbitiaceae, Inocybaceae, Hymenogastraceae, Pluteaceae, Fig. 1A) (Allen 2010; Dinis‐Oliveira 2017). Hallucinogenic mushrooms have a long history of religious use, particularly in Mesoamerica, and were a catalyst of cultural revolution in the West in the mid‐20th century (Nyberg 1992; Letcher 2006). Psilocybin was structurally described and synthesized in 1958 by Albert Hoffman (Hofmann et al. 1958), and a biosynthetic pathway was later proposed based on the transformation of labeled precursor molecules by Psilocybe cubensis (Agurell and Nilsson 1968). However, prohibition since the 1970s (21 U.S. Code § 812—schedules of controlled substances) has limited advances in psilocybin genetics, ecology, and evolution. There has been a recent resurgence of research on hallucinogens in the clinical setting; brain state imaging studies of psilocin exposure have identified changes in neural activity and interconnectivity that underlie subjective experiences, and therapeutic trials have investigated psilocybin's potential for treating major depression and addictive disorders (Griffiths et al. 2011; Carhart‐Harris et al. 2012; Petri et al. 2014; Carhart‐Harris et al. 2016; Johnson et al. 2017). Although the ecological roles of psilocybin, like most secondary metabolites, remain unknown, psilocin's mechanism of action suggests metazoans may be its principal targets.

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ECOLOGICAL DRIVERS OF PSILOCYBIN GENE CLUSTER EVOLUTION
Recent studies suggest that ecology can select for both genome content (Ma et al. 2010; de Jonge et al. 2013) and organization in eukaryotes through both vertical and horizontal patterns of inheritance (Holliday et al. 2015; Kakioka et al. 2015). The phylogenies of PS genes suggest they originally served roles in the wood‐decay niche among fungi, and more recently emerged through both vertical and horizontal transfer in dung‐decay fungi (Figs. 3C and ​and4A).4A). Horizontal transfer and retention of PS clusters are evidence of selection on the PS pathway in the recipient lineage, as secondary metabolite clusters are generally unstable in fungal genomes (Reynolds et al. 2017). In addition to similar ecological pressures, similar genome content among wood and dung‐decaying fungi may also reflect the ecological diversification of Agaricomycetes that accompanied major geological transformations (Fig. 4A). For example, the emergence of true wood opened a massive saprotrophy niche space in the upper Devonian (380 Mya), in which the Agaricomycetes diversified with the aid of key enzymatic innovations (Floudas et al. 2012). The subsequent radiation of herbivorous megafauna during the Eocene approximately 50 MYA (MacFadden 2000) and the spread of grasslands 40 MYA (Retallack 2001) expanded the mammalian dung niche space in which invertebrates and fungi competed. These changes parallel the repeated emergence of dung‐specialization from plant‐decay ancestors in the radiation of Psilocybe and other Agaricales lineages (Ramirez‐Cruz et al. 2013; Tóth et al. 2013). Late stage wood‐decay fungi like Psilocybe spp. likely harbor genetic exaptations for lignin tolerance/degradation, and competition with invertebrates and prokaryotes; thus acquisition of particularly adaptive functions by other fung

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Emphasis added - no special pleading required.

But I may have misunderstood the question - psilocybin isn't an amino acid...although indeed L-tryptophan is demonstrated to be a precurosor to psilocin synthesis in mushrooms through a complicated enzymatic pathway...and we can benefit from this...

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LosTresOjos said:
I feel like we have to understand consciousness and spirituality first before we start to attribute them to anything outside of metaphysics.

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PrimalSoup said:

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OutsideOfMyMind said:
Psilocybin is a tryptamine. It's chemically structured similarly to tryptophan, an amino acid, which helps to produce serotonin and melatonin. These are both responsible for consciousness and perception. I think psilocybin and other hallucinogenic tryptamines like dmt, are amino acids for CONSCIOUSNESS. Building blocks of consciousness. If tryptophan is an amino acid, a building block for physical life, then psilocybin and other tryptamines are amino acids for consciousness and the spiritual realm.

So I think hallucinogenic tryptamines are amino acids for our minds, our bodies don't produce them naturally, so we get them from fungi.

Can someone go a little bit deeper with this thought?

I can't remember who but someone theorized that dmt and tryptamines are the universal "consciousness molecule" that all living beings and entities share in common.

Update: wow I just realized this thread is super old.

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I'll bite.

There is speculation that endogenous DMT serves that purpose but the experiments to demonstrate it on humans are prohibited.  So there's that...

Hallucinogenic tryptamines are widespread in natural substances, not just mushrooms.  Mushrooms are special in that you don't need to do any preparation to extract the alkaloids - just eat them.  And they don't have terrible side effects due to related compounds, mostly.

But the idea that the mushroom evolved them for our consumption is unsupportable.  Psilocybes date back about 50 million years according to current research.  https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130806132852.htm

Quote:

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Using new molecular and computational techniques, the team has produced the first multi-gene evaluation of the evolutionary development of Psilocybe, which constitutes a major step in classifying and naming "magic" mushrooms. Earlier work showed that species of Psilocybe did not commonly descend from a single ancestor. As a result, the hallucinogenic species (the genus Psilocybe) were typically separated from their non-hallucinogenic relatives (the genus Deconica). But this new work now places the two separate monophyletic -- meaning developed from a single ancestor -- groups into different families. Within Psilocybe (family Hymenogastraceae) and Deconica (family Strophariaceae s.str), the authors have discovered several strong infrageneric relationships.

According to the authors, their analysis of various morphological traits of the mushrooms suggests that these typically weren't acquired through a most recent common ancestor and must have evolved independently or undergone several evolutionary losses, probably for ecological reasons. Nevertheless, species of Psilocybe are united to some degree because they have the psychedelic compound psilocybin and other secondary metabolites, or products of metabolism. The authors say that former Psilocybe species that lack these secondary metabolites could also be found in Deconica.

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You might also find this interesting: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6121855/

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Impact Statement
The rate of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) between species of microorganisms is thought to be higher for genes located in gene clusters, which often encode all of the enzymatic, regulatory, and transport‐related steps required for a metabolic pathway to function in a single genomic locus. Such clusters may enhance the evolvability of fungi by facilitating the rapid loss or gain of multigene traits such as the production of bioactive molecules. Although developmentally complex mushroom‐forming fungi are thought to experience little HGT compared with morphologically simpler fungi, a scattered distribution of the hallucinogenic molecule psilocybin among diverse “magic” mushrooms led us to hypothesize that its biosynthetic pathway has been dispersed by HGT of a gene cluster. To test our hypothesis, we sequenced the genomes of three distantly related hallucinogenic mushroom species for comparison with closely related, nonhallucinogenic species. We identified a homologous multigene cluster in each hallucinogenic species by searching for clustering among all genes with a psilocybin‐like distribution among mushroom species. The enzymatic functions of genes within this cluster were confirmed here and in another concurrent study, and phylogenetic analyses support HGT of the cluster between divergent dung decomposers in the genera Psilocybe and Panaeolus, a first for mushroom‐forming fungi. Bioactive molecules like psilocybin are often presumed to have niche‐specific roles, but the ecological contexts in which they evolved are rarely known. We found that distantly related dung‐ and wood‐decay fungi have less variation in their genome content compared to close relatives in alternative niches, suggesting that this content is shaped in part by shared ecological pressures. Coupled with the inheritance patterns of the psilocybin cluster, these data support the hypothesis that psilocybin production is part of a larger adaptive strategy to dung and late wood‐decay niches, which harbor abundant invertebrates that eat or compete with fungi. We speculate that neuroactive compounds like psilocybin that target broadly conserved neurotransmitter receptors may have evolved as a strategy to influence arthropod activity in these niches, and that fungi within these niches could be further sources of neuroactive molecules.

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And the answer perhaps is simple enough:

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Secondary metabolites are small molecules that are widely employed in defense, competition, and signaling among organisms (Raguso et al. 2015). Due to their physiological activities, secondary metabolites have been adopted by both ancient and modern human societies as medical, spiritual, or recreational drugs. Psilocin is a psychoactive agonist of the serotonin (5‐hydroxytryptamine, 5‐HT) ‐2A receptor (Halberstadt and Geyer 2011) and is produced as the phosphorylated prodrug psilocybin by a restricted number of phylogenetically disjunct mushroom forming families of the Agaricales (Bolbitiaceae, Inocybaceae, Hymenogastraceae, Pluteaceae, Fig. 1A) (Allen 2010; Dinis‐Oliveira 2017). Hallucinogenic mushrooms have a long history of religious use, particularly in Mesoamerica, and were a catalyst of cultural revolution in the West in the mid‐20th century (Nyberg 1992; Letcher 2006). Psilocybin was structurally described and synthesized in 1958 by Albert Hoffman (Hofmann et al. 1958), and a biosynthetic pathway was later proposed based on the transformation of labeled precursor molecules by Psilocybe cubensis (Agurell and Nilsson 1968). However, prohibition since the 1970s (21 U.S. Code § 812—schedules of controlled substances) has limited advances in psilocybin genetics, ecology, and evolution. There has been a recent resurgence of research on hallucinogens in the clinical setting; brain state imaging studies of psilocin exposure have identified changes in neural activity and interconnectivity that underlie subjective experiences, and therapeutic trials have investigated psilocybin's potential for treating major depression and addictive disorders (Griffiths et al. 2011; Carhart‐Harris et al. 2012; Petri et al. 2014; Carhart‐Harris et al. 2016; Johnson et al. 2017). Although the ecological roles of psilocybin, like most secondary metabolites, remain unknown, psilocin's mechanism of action suggests metazoans may be its principal targets.

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Here's the timeline:

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ECOLOGICAL DRIVERS OF PSILOCYBIN GENE CLUSTER EVOLUTION
Recent studies suggest that ecology can select for both genome content (Ma et al. 2010; de Jonge et al. 2013) and organization in eukaryotes through both vertical and horizontal patterns of inheritance (Holliday et al. 2015; Kakioka et al. 2015). The phylogenies of PS genes suggest they originally served roles in the wood‐decay niche among fungi, and more recently emerged through both vertical and horizontal transfer in dung‐decay fungi (Figs. 3C and ​and4A).4A). Horizontal transfer and retention of PS clusters are evidence of selection on the PS pathway in the recipient lineage, as secondary metabolite clusters are generally unstable in fungal genomes (Reynolds et al. 2017). In addition to similar ecological pressures, similar genome content among wood and dung‐decaying fungi may also reflect the ecological diversification of Agaricomycetes that accompanied major geological transformations (Fig. 4A). For example, the emergence of true wood opened a massive saprotrophy niche space in the upper Devonian (380 Mya), in which the Agaricomycetes diversified with the aid of key enzymatic innovations (Floudas et al. 2012). The subsequent radiation of herbivorous megafauna during the Eocene approximately 50 MYA (MacFadden 2000) and the spread of grasslands 40 MYA (Retallack 2001) expanded the mammalian dung niche space in which invertebrates and fungi competed. These changes parallel the repeated emergence of dung‐specialization from plant‐decay ancestors in the radiation of Psilocybe and other Agaricales lineages (Ramirez‐Cruz et al. 2013; Tóth et al. 2013). Late stage wood‐decay fungi like Psilocybe spp. likely harbor genetic exaptations for lignin tolerance/degradation, and competition with invertebrates and prokaryotes; thus acquisition of particularly adaptive functions by other fung

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Emphasis added - no special pleading required.

But I may have misunderstood the question - psilocybin isn't an amino acid...although indeed L-tryptophan is demonstrated to be a precurosor to psilocin synthesis in mushrooms through a complicated enzymatic pathway...and we can benefit from this...

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LosTresOjos said:
Find a secret like that is like finding god.

  Unless its a simple bio chemistry question.

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OutsideOfMyMind said:

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PrimalSoup said:
huge long post

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As someone who is on the pathway to studying biochemistry with intent to one day do my own psychedelic research, this is EXTREMELY fascinating to me. THERE IS SOME SORT OF SECRET OR HIDDEN REASON WHY THESE SUBSTANCES CONTAIN THE ALKALOIDS THAT THEY DO. IT'S NOT JUST BY ACCIDENT OR CHANCE. I did not mean to use caps lock and I don't feel like fixing it because I'm on my phone. There is way more than what meets the eye in the world of psychedelic studies. I love this kind of stuff that gets my brain thinking about complex things.

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Well yeah I don't disagree, at least some of the time.  It just seems like too much of a coincidence, in the first place, and then there's the feeling of just knowing how to navigate psychedelic spaces, and they offer this feeling of coming home. 


It could of course be the other way around - human evolution affected by lemur like ancestors 50m years back developing a strong liking for certain kinds of wild fungus and self selecting for the advantages (of stealth, or cunning, or some hyperspatial sense) of adaptation it provided.  That we get what we get out of it would just be entirely accidental, albeit beneficial. 

Still it's an ancient calling.