Psychedelic compound from magic mushrooms produced in yeast

Bio-based production of psilocybin has gained big interest and researchers have already proved small-scale production in E. coli. However, production in bacteria comes with a wide range of concerns which can be addressed by using yeast instead.

In yeast, the scientists prove that psilocybin can be produced de novo, which means that you can produce the molecule by simply growing the yeast with sugar and other nutrients, without the need to add any other starting substrates.

Producing psilocybin de novo in E. coli is difficult since a key enzyme in the biosynthetic pathway doesn't work in bacteria, and so to get around this problem you need to add an expensive starting substrate, making the whole production process too costly.

For further details see:

N. Milne, P. Thomsen, N. Mølgaard Knudsen, P. Rubaszka, M. Kristensen, I. Borodina. Metabolic engineering of Saccharomyces cerevisiae for the de novo production of psilocybin and related tryptamine derivatives. Metabolic Engineering, 2020; 60: 25 DOI: 10.1016/j.ymben.2019.12.007

Posted by Dr. Tim Sandle, Pharmaceutical Microbiology Resources (http://www.pharmamicroresources.com/)