Pathway 02 — Psychedelics & Science
Pathway 04 — Mycology
Bioengineering the Psychedelics: How Psilocybin, Mescaline and Ibogaine Are Grown
Peyote takes ten years to mature. Iboga trees take longer. A third of Cambodia’s cinnamon forest has been felled for safrole since 2000. Jeffrey Gerst sets out what it would take to grow these compounds in yeast and garden plants instead.
● 7 modules
● 18 lessons
● 52 min
● Focused
Prof. Jeffrey Gerst
Molecular Geneticist · Weizmann Institute of Science
course overview
“This is not going to supplant sourcing from natural sources. But it should be another tool in our toolkit, to make sure that we create the psychedelics in a way which does not cause trauma to the environment or the indigenous species which develop them.”
what you will learn
Trace where psychedelic compounds actually originate, wild harvest, clandestine synthesis, or pharmaceutical manufacture, and the costs attached to each
Assess the conservation pressure on slow-growing source species: peyote, caapi, iboga, and the Sonoran Desert toad
Follow the safrole supply chain from Southeast Asian root bark to the deforestation it drives in Cambodia
Understand the four-gene psilocybin cluster and how horizontal gene transfer spread it across more than 200 fungal species
Follow the comparative ’omics method used to find an unknown biosynthetic pathway, from metabolomics through to candidate genes
Evaluate rational enzyme design and machine learning as tools for improving biosynthetic yield
course sYllabus
free preview — Module 1 · Lesson 1
watch free
The Emergence of the Psychedelic Renaissance and Rising Global Demand
Jeffrey Gerst opens with the problem the rest of the course answers: demand for psychedelic compounds is rising faster than the wild can supply it. Harvesting from nature, he argues, drives habitat destruction and species loss, and overexploits the traditional societies in which these plants and fungi are found.
aprox: 2 minutes
about the instructor
Prof. Jeffrey Gerst
Molecular Geneticist · Weizmann Institute of Science
Jeffrey Gerst is a professor of biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science, where he runs a molecular biology laboratory studying the biogenesis of RNA and its role in cell and organismal physiology. Alongside that work he has a long standing interest in the science of the psychedelics — not their effects, but their origins: which genes build them, in which organisms, and whether those pathways can be moved into yeast and common plants. He is the author of a book on the biology and evolution of psychedelic compounds and the bioengineering of their production.
Molecular genetics
RNA biogenesis
Synthetic biology
Biosynthetic pathways
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