Colin Domnauer is an ethnomycologist and doctoral researcher in the Dentinger Lab at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah, where he works on one of mycology’s longest-standing open questions: the identity of the psychoactive bolete mushrooms. For close to a century, people in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, the forests of Yunnan and the northern Philippines have reported that eating certain blue-staining boletes brings on visions of tiny people, what clinicians call Lilliputian hallucinations. Until recently nobody had established which mushroom was responsible, or why.
His fieldwork spans three continents: buying specimens in Yunnan mushroom markets, collecting with local guides in the Philippines, and running chemical extractions and bioassays in Salt Lake City. Using DNA sequencing he identified Lanmaoa asiatica as the species behind two of the three independent cultural reports, the first rigorous molecular evidence that the phenomenon has a real biological basis. In 2026 he published the genus-level phylogenomics with Bryn Dentinger in Mycologia, resolving Lanmaoa‘s global evolutionary relationships and describing a previously unrecognised lineage.
The compound itself remains unidentified. If it proves to be novel, it would represent a third independent origin of psychoactive chemistry in the fungal kingdom, alongside psilocybin and ibotenic acid.
Colin came to fungi indirectly. A Bay Area native, he held a lifelong interest in astronomy and took his undergraduate degree in the field at UC Berkeley before turning to the ethnobiology of psychoactive substances, completing a thesis on the use of vilca (Anadenanthera spp.) in pre-Columbian Andean cultures. He presented that work alongside the bolete research at ESPD 55, and returns to the symposium series at ESPD 60. Outside the lab he will take almost any excuse to be outdoors with friends, most of all foraging for mushrooms.
Course
- Lilliputian Lore: The Science and Mystery of Hallucinogenic Bolete Mushrooms – Living Library, 2026. Six modules, twenty lessons.
Presentations
- Reports of Psychoactive Boletes, with Bryn Dentinger – ESPD 55, 2022
- Expanding evidence of Anadenanthera in the pre-Columbian Andes – ESPD 55, 2022
Chapters
- “Reports of Psychoactive Boletes”, with Bryn Dentinger, in Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs, Vol. III, pp. 247–262. Synergetic Press, 2025.
Selected publications
- Colin Domnauer and Bryn T. M. Dentinger. “Phylogenomic systematics of Lanmaoa (Boletaceae) reveals cryptic diversity, resolves global evolutionary relationships, and suggests a novel psychoactive lineage”, Mycologia 118(4), pp. 732–742, 2026.
- Keaton Tremble, Terry Henkel, Alexander Bradshaw, Colin Domnauer and others. “A revised phylogeny of Boletaceae using whole genome sequences”, Mycologia 116(3), pp. 392–408, 2024.
