New Technique for Measuring Potency in Magic Mushrooms with Kevin Schug
Alisa Nappa
Today we sit down with Kevin Schug, the Shimadzu Distinguished Professor of Analytical Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, to chat about his work using liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry to measure psilocybin potency in magic mushrooms. We geek out on all the analytical equipment, how they work, and what goes into analytically testing magic mushrooms for potency and even novel compounds.
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TRANSCRIPT
Unknown Speaker 0:11
Welcome, welcome, you are listening to the mushroom revival podcast. I'm your host, Alex Dora. And we are absolutely obsessed with the wonderful, wacky, mysterious world of mushrooms and fungi. We bring on guests and experts from all around the globe to geek out with us go down this mysterious rabbit hole to try to figure out what the heck is going on with these weird fungal beings, and we interview experts to get an insight on the niche that they are studying and a greater insight on this communication and symbiosis that we have with these. This Mike illogical world. So we have Kevin chug, tuning in from Czech Republic, is that right? That's right.
Unknown Speaker 1:00
And we're going to talk about analytical chemistry when it comes to
Unknown Speaker 1:05
psilocybin containing mushrooms and all the new techniques for measuring potency. And we're gonna get pretty analytical in this episode, I flunked out of organic chemistry. So I'm going to struggle a bit
Unknown Speaker 1:19
talking about all the various different machines used and things like that. But I'm going to try my best. And so Kevin, how're you doing today?
Unknown Speaker 1:28
I'm doing great. Don't worry, I was not that great at organic chemistry either. Luckily, the the whole analytical side of instrumentation spoke to me a little bit better. But yeah, doing well. Thanks, Alex, really happy to be here and talk to you.
Unknown Speaker 1:43
Nice. So how did you originally get into mushrooms?
Unknown Speaker 1:48
Well, so you know, I, I'm an analytical chemistry professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. So I'm just here in Czech Republic visiting for a while.
Unknown Speaker 1:59
And we kind of specialize in being able to measure all kinds of different mixtures and tell you, you know, what's in it, and how much certain things are in there. And we've always been drawn to kind of non traditional research areas, we've done a lot of work looking at, you know, environmental contamination of groundwater from oil and gas extraction, it's not something you can easily get funding for.
Unknown Speaker 2:25
And so we kind of saw it as a challenge to go after that. And some efforts, you know, led us similarly into into cannabis space. And, again, you know, we were able to do a little bit and got kind of lured into the psychedelic space after pursuing DEA via licensure to, to get a research.
Unknown Speaker 2:49
You can get a research license be able to do that work in my lab. And so it's kind of just drawn to things that are being maybe studied as much and trying to contribute where we can.
Unknown Speaker 3:02
So I'm living in Austin, Texas right now. But I grew up or spent the last like eight years in Western Massachusetts and Massachusetts is way different in terms of laws for psychedelics and things like that. And when I was living there, weed was legalized. And, you know, we're growing it in our house, and he was very, and three of the towns that I used to live in now are decriminalized for psilocybin mushrooms.
Unknown Speaker 3:31
Texas, way different way more strict, probably one of the last states that will legalize psychedelics in any capacity.
Unknown Speaker 3:43
So how is that you know,
Unknown Speaker 3:46
in Arlington, Texas, getting a VA license and navigating that. Yeah, and right. And, you know, for the mushroom, we're working with people in Arizona, which okay, maybe yours has seen a similar conservative conservatism.
Unknown Speaker 4:03
I don't know. Yeah, it was, you know, I grew up on the east coast as well. And, you know, same thing. I have buddies, you know, living in states that all this stuff is legal.
Unknown Speaker 4:13
Luckily, it's, I think Texas is welcoming to have research as long as it's following, you know, legal bounds. And
Unknown Speaker 4:22
I originally thought it was be extremely difficult to get my hands on a DEA license to do research. I've heard horror stories from from friends and colleagues. But once I went down the path to do it, it happened pretty easily. I mean, I think we're pretty benign, just as a university doing research. But I think these days also the climate has shifted to least where the DEA is willing to support more research into these areas by you know, legitimate institutions.
Unknown Speaker 4:56
I'm not too familiar with it, but I think in you know,
Unknown Speaker 5:00
20 maybe 19 or something that the DEA approved psilocybin as a breakthrough therapy, or something along those lines, did that make the process of applying for a DEA license a lot easier now that it's, you know, quote unquote, Breakthrough Therapy? Yeah, I think so. In fact, you know that that story kind of weaves in very much with how I got involved, I've been working with Dr. Sue Cicely she runs the Scottsdale Research Institute, and I think was the first person to get a kind of DEA license for manufacture of mushrooms. But she was very much involved in getting these right to try Act, passed through the government where she deals with patients who are kind of at the end of life and don't have any other options and was keen on trying to give these patients access to a treatment that could reduce anxiety and depression. And certainly, that's what some clinical studies have shown to be some positive benefit of this combined, you know, psilocybin in psychotherapy.
Unknown Speaker 6:10
So, yeah, I mean, I know that she was foremost in getting that all kind of pushed through. And I think that the subsequent clinical work showed some really positive benefit. And that I believe, did open the door for DEA to provide some more opportunities for people who are interested in doing this research.
Unknown Speaker 6:32
And, you know, we saw a similar thing happen in the cannabis space where, you know, probably back in the 60s, weed was weed, you know, and there's only probably one strain, it was mostly brick weed, and, you know, it's just no one tested for anything. And
Unknown Speaker 6:48
and then, you know, once it started going into the medical space, and legalizing, you know, we have all these different, you know, strains and cultivars, and we're figuring out all the terpene profiles and all that, you know, it's getting really complex, but there's a lot of testing in it. And we're seeing the same thing with now philosophy mushrooms, as well is we're, you know, figuring out all these new different compounds, and what are they even doing in the human body and all these different profiles of, of each cultivars and things like that?
Unknown Speaker 7:21
You know, the reason I Found You was through an article talking about a new technique for measuring potency and magic mushrooms.
Unknown Speaker 7:29
So I'm curious what this new technique is, and how is it different from the preceding method? Yeah, it just kind of echoes some of your sentiment I kind of one of the attractive things about getting into the psilocybin research is that I kind of felt like it was like cannabis research was 15 years ago. And yeah, you know, even though they have all these different strains of cannabis, and they're all much more well characterized, it is still difficult for me to get that to work on in Texas, because I have to have a DEA approved supplier send it to me. And so if I had a lab in Oregon, or in California or Colorado, that would be easy research to do. But unfortunately, I've always been limited to using to working with him there.
Unknown Speaker 8:16
But anyway, you know, the psilocybin space. What's interesting is that a lot of the clinical trial work that had been done previously has been used just synthetic psilocybin as a standalone drug. And just as we know, cannabis has, you know, all of these other cannabinoids and terpenes and other components. psilocybin mushrooms certainly have other bioactive molecules in them. And I don't think it's, I don't think I'd be surprised if we find hundreds of different you know, these tryptamine alkaloids, like you have a cannabinoids, but
Unknown Speaker 8:52
there's enough in there that has not been really studied strain to strain. And of course, not even, you know, tested in a biological sense to understand what's in there. But you know, the first step in the whole process, because Sue is, was interested in us doing more clinical work with whole mushrooms is that we had to be able to show a reliable potency determination for the mushrooms to be able to say that this is the dose that they're going to be given specifically just you know, psilocybin and psilocybin.
Unknown Speaker 9:26
So not not at that point, we haven't, you know, we've we've now since done looking at, you know, larger components of that are in the mushrooms, but, you know, we started out with just this potency determination,
Unknown Speaker 9:37
so that you could be able to provide a reliable dose and then pursue using of these, you know, whole mushrooms for for various clinical studies.
Unknown Speaker 9:49
So,
Unknown Speaker 9:52
I'm a dummy.
Unknown Speaker 9:54
And so, can you explain what mass spec is? For Dummies? Yeah, so
Unknown Speaker 10:00
I
Unknown Speaker 10:01
should mention, you know, the technique that we're using is liquid chromatography mass spectrometry. And I would not say that, you know, we are pioneered a brand new technique to measure this, these psilocybin potency. In fact, there are studies in the literature that have a more, let's say forensics bent on them, you know, because of the legal nature of the mushrooms that they were built more for kind of testing on that side of thing, our whole goal was to create this kind of method that would be reliable more from a clinical standpoint. But we use liquid chromatography, mass spectrometry, and, you know, kind of key to mass spectrometry is a tool that you can weigh ions, that, you know, each molecule has its own different mass, by the way that it's made up of different atoms. And mass spectrometry allows you to very specifically know what you're analyzing, and get both quantitative information of how much there's something there, and qualitative information as well. And there's all kinds of different flavors of mass spectrometry, it's an extremely broad realm of technology. And we've been lucky enough to be able to use different flavors of this, you know, to study different aspects of the mushrooms.
Unknown Speaker 11:21
So, in layman's terms, you know, if you put in, you know, I'm just making this up like a gram of mushrooms into a mass spec machine, it runs a profile, and it says, Oh, it has 24 different compounds in it.
Unknown Speaker 11:39
And all these different compounds have all these different weights. And based on the weights, you can determine kind of the chemical makeup of of those compounds. Is that? Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, that in the end, that's kind of what you get to, it's a little bit more complex, because, you know, we can't just load the whole gram of mushrooms in there, we have to first extract the, the components from there, and that takes some care, because these compounds are not the most stable handling, like psilocybin will convert in the presence of water to psilocybin. And so we don't want that happening before we do our measurements, that takes a lot of care in the sample preparation. And then the mass spectrometer can't handle too much stuff at once. So we use this liquid chromatograph to kind of separate the different components over time. So we inject the our mixture into this instrument, and the different components will come out at different times from the instrument each time going into the mass spectrometer, and yep, so at the end of that analysis, however, many signals, you see, you get that mass information for those, you have some ability to maybe fragment those ions. So it's like a little, you know, it's like a puzzle piece, you know, you can break apart these ions and see what the sizes are of those and kind of piece it back together and get some idea of what those are. But in the end, the idea is to be able to have a chemical makeup of that sample that you extracted and analyzed. And I've seen a graph of a liquid chromatography read out, you know, the different
Unknown Speaker 13:17
peaks. Yeah. Reads. And
Unknown Speaker 13:21
the peaks. Yeah, and I'm curious, if you have a very complex
Unknown Speaker 13:28
substance of many different compounds in the mixture, you need to also use liquid chromatography, along with mass spec. Whereas if you had just a single compound, then you could use just mass spec is that is that right? Like liquid chromatography breaks it out into all the different peaks, and kind of separates the different compounds in a way? Well, you know, the mass spectrometer is the really expensive part of that instrument. So to kind of make a parallel in a lot of cannabis testing, to do cannabinoids, they will just use the liquid chromatograph, and then they just shine light, they use a UV visible detector, and they just shine light through it. And they can measure those, those peaks as they come out. And they know which one is which. But as you have a much more complex mixture.
Unknown Speaker 14:17
As you're wanting to look at lower and lower levels of things in a mixture, then you need to have very specific detection. So that's where you know coupling the liquid chromatograph to be able to separate these peaks out the mixture and then have the mass spectrometer to give you that information. And you can kind of pick and choose which information you want. So when we are looking for just the potency testing, we're saying okay, just look for these masses that are associated with the psilocybin and Cillessen ignore everything else. And if we've done our job right and removed interferences based on how we prepared the sample and separated, then we should be able to get a very reproducible number for that.
Unknown Speaker 14:58
But yeah, I mean, there's there's all kinds of
Unknown Speaker 15:00
Different levels of complexity, but pretty much anytime you're measuring a plant species, it's got a ton of stuff in it. And you need to have robust sample preparation and analytical techniques to get reliable results.
Unknown Speaker 15:13
Right. And I was reading an article that you said kind of the hardest part of doing this research was finding a reliable method for the grinding slash milling process, the extraction process, I mean, you were just talking about, you know, keeping psilocybin from converting to psilocybin is really hard.
Unknown Speaker 15:34
Because it's really easy to degrade psilocybin. And so So how was that process? And did you feel like you cracked the code on on developing those kind of prep, preparatory processes? Yeah, and again, like I said, we did have some good guidance from from some limited past literature. But you know, it's, it's not sufficient enough to, you know, break out your old mortar and pestle and grind that thing up like that, or even putting it into a coffee grinder is not really going to give you as Hello homogeneous and reproducible grinding. So we were lucky enough to have a company called Fritsch, they make all kinds of milling tools they joined in with us. And for us what was you know, it's really, you know, an awesome food blender, you know, that can very precisely control the rotation of the blades for short periods of time back and forth to give you reproducible milling, and you can do this in an environment where you're not introducing much water. Sometimes they, you know, they would even tell you to, like, you could cool these things down with liquid nitrogen, so they all kind of crack up.
Unknown Speaker 16:46
But that didn't end up being necessary. And in that case, and then, after that, really, it's a matter of finding the right solvent that you can extract these things.
Unknown Speaker 16:57
I think one of the, you know, interesting aspect of all this was people who have maybe equate this kind of blue color to, you know, psilocybin mushroom potency.
Unknown Speaker 17:09
But when we're doing this preparation, we absolutely do not want to see that blue color, because that's totally telling you that psilocybin has degraded to psilocybin and then psilocybin has degraded into this other thing that is blue, so you've exposed it to some environment, that certainly has changed it.
Unknown Speaker 17:28
So we ended up serving a bunch of different solvents we can use and basically avoiding some water, we, you know, we ended up doing this with an alcohol and some some weak acid and, you know, keep the thing shielded from light and air as much as we can mix it up and vortex it really well. And then you can kind of filter off that and put it into your, your instrument for measurement. So, you know, it is fairly straightforward technique, it's something that, you know, testing labs for sure are going to be able to do, but if you haven't taken those steps ahead of time, and like I said, even we were verifying some things that we were learning in the medical literature to make sure that, you know, that was consistent. But I think that, you know, in terms of what you could use for testing for, okay, commercial labs receiving human clinical labs, that this is a very reliable, robust method. Now,
Unknown Speaker 18:20
I don't know if you've ever read this paper, it came out in 2020. And it it's called this stability of psilocybin and it's for analogs in the biomass of the psycho tropic mushroom philosophique events. This sounds familiar.
Unknown Speaker 18:36
It's I highly recommend I've been toting this paper for since it came out because I think no one has been really talking about this as much it was just analyzing, you know,
Unknown Speaker 18:51
how tryptamines degrade at various temperatures and the drying process what happens when you do blend it up into a powder? How long do those tryptamines last? And what is what is the rate of degradation when you powder it you know, what happens when you put it in the freezer? What happens when you you know, all these different things, great paper, because you know, a lot of people
Unknown Speaker 19:19
even if they have a perfect grow and they are doing everything right and then they have the best cultivar or in the world you know, and and then they dehydrate it at too high of a temperature or they blend it into a powder and put it in capsules. It's like well, all that potency just went out the door you know, just because you dehydrated it a little too high temperature or you know, you put it in capsules and you waited too long before you gave it to someone you took it.
Unknown Speaker 19:48
So, yeah, I think I think you know, getting that process right is really, really important and focusing on on Yeah, how do you mill it? How do you extract
Unknown Speaker 20:00
it to prevent that potency degradation is a really, really important topic of conversation that I, I would like to see more research into, and I think is really, really important. Alongside just, you know, how do you grow it correctly? And and how do you, you know, create consistent lab results, lab, lab to lab, you know, because that's, that's even a problem for us in the functional mushroom world is like, you know, lab to lab, we could have different, totally different results for the compounds that we're looking for. Because probably they milled it incorrectly or, you know, they there's just different. They're, they're they're slight differences and how they prepare it for analysis that that changes the whole results, you know. So I think it's really important to have a very baseline approach to the these processes. Yeah, and and ultimately, I think you have to have access to some of this instrumentation to make those determinations for sure. This paper that you're talking about was probably using the same techniques that we're using.
Unknown Speaker 21:06
And, you know, we're working together with this lab in Arizona, that that's growing the mushrooms and drying the mushrooms, but we haven't really gotten far enough along to even say, Well, how about you vary some of these things so that we can make sure that you're not doing anything that might be hurting the mushrooms there? I mean, I think that they seem to be making a very consistent product.
Unknown Speaker 21:28
But then, you know, what we're looking at taking it a step further and thinking about the clinical world is how to, you know, give this to a patient. And like you said, it's the powderized it and put it in capsules, you know, what's the shelf life on that going to be? We've also been doing some studies recently, where we've looked at preparation of teas for extracts. And, you know, a couple of things we've learned is that if you're going to make a tea, first, you better drink it quickly. And second, you better add some lemon to it, because this will give you a little bit longer profile for the degradation of the psilocybin. But you know, they were originally thinking about giving patients tea, and, you know, the combination of the heat with going into water so quickly,
Unknown Speaker 22:16
based on the experiments we did in our lab, and we get to publish them, those will be upcoming things. But, you know, we were like, well, maybe we should come up with a different way to do this, if we really need to report to the USDA, FDA, this is exactly how much of the psilocybin and Cillessen they received.
Unknown Speaker 22:38
Yeah, I'm curious, because I read in one article, but I didn't see it in your paper was about something called quadrupole time, the flight mass spectrometry, spectrometry is what you used. So, so, actually, so in the paper that we published, and you've seen, we actually use what's called a triple quadrupole. And this is a mass spectrometer that's really perfect for targeting specific compounds. So to do this potency study, more recently, the work and I've presented at a couple of different venues and conferences, have some talks coming up. But the more recent work that I think is more interesting is work that we're doing with a quadrupole time of flight mass spectrometer. And what this does is allows you to get information over a broader range of, of chemicals during the analysis. Specifically, what the time of flight does is actually it lets you determine a mass to more decimal places. So for example, if I measure the mass of a molecule to be 108, there are so many different ways 100 names, maybe not that much. But let's say it's 200. Now, there's a lot of different ways that you can put together carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, right come up with a mass close to this. But if I can measure that mass to 108.2385, then there now becomes a much fewer number of ways that I can assemble these atoms to come up to that mass. And so the time of flight gives you higher maths accuracy, and able to now actually define elemental compositions that then you can have a better confidence in assigning different types of compounds to it.
Unknown Speaker 24:29
Do you do you do that analysis by hand?
Unknown Speaker 24:32
How's that analysis done? I'm just curious, like, if you get a reading of one away or something does does the person running the machine are they you know, writing out every single Oh, this this could be the compound that adds up to one away and or is it an algorithm on a computer? Like how do you determine that? Yeah, well, as you get to much more complicated analysis with a lot more masses and a lot more signals we do we rely on
Unknown Speaker 25:00
A lot of informatics tools. So we have, you know, processes where we would, you know, make sure that we have certain quality controls in our data to make sure that we're, you know, seeing the things we expect to see, we have processes that we have to extract and kind of normalize the signals that we can use, it will take him into another program to make sure all the signals are of good quality. And then even for further, you have tools that are trying to look at the data and say, Okay, this is a, an important feature that might distinguish, let's say, you know, this strain of magic mushroom from this strain and magic mushroom. So you can ask the data, all kinds of questions that you want to know the differences between, and then it will do statistical comparisons.
Unknown Speaker 25:46
And then, and then we rely on on massive databases of chemical compounds that are out there for natural products, foods, whatever, to help us then try to make sense of that data. So yeah, there might be some simple few things that you can do by hands, but the size of these data sets that you get, you know, by the time you've make the measurement, and hopefully you've taken care and made the measurement all reliably, you're relying on a lot of computer informatics to get the information.
Unknown Speaker 26:17
I also read that you wanted to use hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography in the future. I don't know if you've started using it. But I'm just curious what this would allow you to see, or research that regular liquid chromatography wouldn't. Yeah, so liquid chromatography is pretty versatile.
Unknown Speaker 26:37
But there's, there's certain modes of separations that are curved, that will favor certain types of compounds. And so the, the most common one that's out there is just called reverse phase liquid chromatography.
Unknown Speaker 26:51
But if you have a certain set of compounds that are not retained in your column and are not separated, then you might be compelled to go to a different mode of chromatography, and hydrophilic interaction. liquid chromatography is one that actually is very favorable towards compounds that aren't retained in reverse phase separations. And what we found when we did some of these kind of untargeted techniques, and saw the data that we were finding, we saw that a lot of the signals that looked like they were really interesting, were coming out very early in our separation.
Unknown Speaker 27:31
So some people have used hydrophilic liquid in hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography on mushroom analysis. But that number goes down way further than you talk about the more standard techniques. And we feel like there's a lot we can learn by applying some of these other technologies that we're used to using in different areas now to the mushrooms that just don't think it's been explored. And the data tells us, we'll we'll get some other interesting information from that.
Unknown Speaker 28:01
Yeah, I don't know how familiar you are with drug discovery, and I'm just curious about the process of, you know, say, say you get a reading, you know, minute 15. And, and the weight is like 124.5 to six, and you're like, What the hell is that compound? And you search everything and every database and you're like, I have no idea what that is. Must be a new compound. I'm just making this story up. Maybe that's the way it goes. I'm not sure. But
Unknown Speaker 28:34
okay. Yeah. So like, how, how does one discover a new compound? And if you don't, if there's, if no one has ever discovered it before, if there's no database? How do you go from mass spec of reading the weight to? I don't know, giving it? How do you know what it looks like? You use another machine? Like, how do you go about that? Yeah, so I mean, that really is takes it to a whole nother level. And, but the situation to describe absolutely can and does happen, you know, for various reasons, you analyze these complex natural products, and you're gonna come across, you know, things that you don't know what they are. And if for some reason you want to know what that is, then the game now becomes very different because I have to go and use something like nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy NMR. And, you know, on the liquid chromatograph mass spectrometer, I'm injecting, you know, microliters and I'm analyzing data grams of material you're so tiny amounts of stuff that's on there. If I want to go now, and I'm interested in one compound there, and I need to go measure it on an NMR, which is a it's that's a technique that will tell me the actual chemical structure. I can get some idea from a mass spectrometer, but you know, a lot of things look the same if they have the same mass and the same elemental formula. If I really want to nail it down. I now have to go in separate
Unknown Speaker 30:00
purified milligrams of that material from that, so I need to heat get, you know, I'd have to get a huge amount of mushrooms, I'd have to extract all of that, I'd have to separate it at a much larger scale, so that I could collect enough of that material to be able to put it into an NMR.
Unknown Speaker 30:17
And there is, you know, there's there are certainly plenty of people who have gone that route.
Unknown Speaker 30:23
You know, and we've played with some things in the past trying to find like, new antibacterial compounds for marine natural products, and, but it's really, it's a huge challenge. You know, you can find all kinds of very interesting things from these analysis. And it might be tell you, you know, this is unique to that class of, you know, mushroom versus this class of mushroom. But to figure out exactly what it is, takes a lot more effort. And so I think that that'll slow the process, we know some other tryptamine alkaloids that are like psilocybin that are out there. But it's going to take a lot of work to really dig down in the weeds, especially if they're at much lower quantity than than the psilocybin is, we want to know what they are.
Unknown Speaker 31:06
And you're saying, you have to extract that single unknown compound? Ultimately, yeah, you'd have to, you'd have to be able to, you know, you have all your, your mushroom, whatever, you have to do a huge scale extraction. But yeah, you're gonna have to separate and purify that molecule away from everything else, in order to read it into like, for example, an NMR instrument, and get a very clear determination of what a structure is, because if there's other things in there, they will generate signal to, and so differentiating the signals that are from the impurities versus that that pure compounds, can, that's a very challenging thing to do.
Unknown Speaker 31:47
So the the separation and the purification from a complex system is very challenging. How did?
Unknown Speaker 31:56
How does one go about that? You know, in layman's terms, you know, say, say you think you found a new alkaloid in this sulci. B. Mushroom?
Unknown Speaker 32:07
How do you separate it from all the other compounds? Like, do you figure out that, oh, all the other compounds, they evaporate at this temperature, but this one has a much higher temperatures? So I'm just going to heat it up, or, you know, this solvent is really good at pulling, you know, the like D? How does? How does one even go about that? And just to isolate that single compound? So yeah, yes. So what you are trying to do is find some unique physical chemical nature of that compound that would allow you to distinguish it from other ways. But it's, you do it in kind of an iterative process. So you know, we'd take our large amount of stuff, and we'd kind of crude fractionate, that so that we can get a slightly less complex mixture, that we can then go and separate further. And so as we can start to kind of fractionate, and hone in on these, we'll have simpler and simpler mixtures, hopefully, we have enough of that thing still left to measure in the end. And then that is the challenge.
Unknown Speaker 33:07
You know, you know, if we, I think one of the places that you would start, if you had, for example, that new tryptamine alkaloid that you're interested in targeting, I'd really want to go and find the mushroom that makes the most of that first, right, so that I've at least stack the deck in my favor there and said, Okay, this strain makes a lot of, you know, this compound X that we're interested in.
Unknown Speaker 33:29
But yeah, then that process is to kind of weed it down. And so you change, just like we talked about going from reverse phase to hydrophilic interaction, liquid chromatography, we can change the way that we separate the compounds, and hopefully get to a point that we can purify it away from most everything else that's in there. But it takes a lot of strategy and time to devise a way to do that, because every molecule is different and every mixture to be different.
Unknown Speaker 33:56
Well, I'm glad you're doing this work, and not me, because
Unknown Speaker 34:00
I would have
Unknown Speaker 34:02
it's interesting, I'm getting flashbacks of working in the lab in my organic chemistry class and having no idea what was going on.
Unknown Speaker 34:10
I'm glad we can have a conversation about eight years later. And that's, that's all i That's all I can do in this field. And I'm happy with that. That's, that's great. Well, you know, you've probably packed a big long column in your organic chemistry class. Yeah, and had to separate stuff on a large scale. And that's kind of how you'd have to start where you can load a bunch of stuff on this column kind of crudely separated. But then you got to get finer and finer. But yeah, I've been very happy to have some great industry partners who help provide us with some of the state of the art instrumentation that we use.
Unknown Speaker 34:45
And, and obviously, some very motivated students who, who are willing to spend the time to go through it and do this work and dig in the weeds. And, you know, I think it is a very interesting topic and that's, you know, like we talked about going after now
Unknown Speaker 35:00
on traditional research, if you can find something that tickles the fancy of a student who really wants to contribute in that new area, and though they'll go to great lengths to do that, you know, much more than following your cookbook in your organic chemistry lab might provoke you to do.
Unknown Speaker 35:18
Yeah, yeah, I'm just really grateful. I had really good lab partners who knew what they were doing. So I was not doing it alone. I had just amazing lab partners who would do everything but I, I worked with with mass spec liquid chromatography, I didn't know what the heck I was doing at the time. But they did. And we got good grades on the actual lab report. I didn't.
Unknown Speaker 35:43
I'm glad they did. And I didn't. I wasn't, yeah, I was probably a terrible lab partner. But
Unknown Speaker 35:52
people in some, you know, either to kind of, like, you know, and tolerate chemistry, or you kind of hate it. And, you know, I think just having, you know, some idea of what's going on out there, you know, if you're talking to all these people, ultimately, you got to analyze the stuff to know what's in it. And,
Unknown Speaker 36:10
you know, having some background and knowledge of what's there is important to have a reasonable conversation about the challenges that are involved.
Unknown Speaker 36:20
So, you know, you teach at Arlington, but you're also in Czech Republic right now for how long?
Unknown Speaker 36:27
Not? Yeah, I'm here. I'm about halfway through a five month stay here. Nice. Yeah. You said a Fulbright Scholarship, which is amazing teaching kids about analytical chemistry. And you said today, you actually talked about the psychedelic field and mushrooms and analytical chemistry. So how, how was that conversation with the kids? And was there? What Yeah, what is the current
Unknown Speaker 36:55
kind of infrastructure and laws in the Czech Republic, in sacred for psychedelics, I would have to imagine it's very similar, like in most of the US, I think, you know, it's something that's gaining attention, certainly, the students knew what I was talking about. We didn't get, you know, hot and heavy and analytical chemistry, but this class when I was giving this lecture is actually an English for chemists class. And so it's first year college students, and they're meant to be learning some of these chemistry principles under the guise of some, you know, special topics of current interest. And I was able to come here and have some carte blanche to say how I was going to do this, and I was, you know, I easily picked psychedelics because I knew that that would be interesting, you know, from the, you know, history, you know, free history, to the history and, you know, route towards, you know, wanting to use it for treating mental health and clinical trials. But, you know, becomes very interesting, I think, discussion when you look at, for example, the structure of Cillessen it almost is exactly the same as the structure of serotonin and then you can talk about how these, you know, work on brain receptors, and then physiologically, what's understood and what's not understood,
Unknown Speaker 38:12
you know, things like, like, in in DMT is supremely fascinating that we have this all in our body all the time, you know, it's in plants everywhere plants and animals everywhere, but nobody really understands why it's there.
Unknown Speaker 38:27
But yet, you know, taking in large doses can have this, these you know, out of body experiences, you know, hallucinations and whatnot. So, I think I got to learn a ton more than the analytical chemistry to teach it to them, but you know, then I could see their interest rising because they don't know what type of chemists they want to be. So if you can feed them a little bit organic chemistry and biochemistry and drug discovery and analytical chemistry, you're gonna pique some interest there. So yeah, it's been really a fantastic experience to be here. I'm in Olympics Czech Republic, which is about three hours east of Prague.
Unknown Speaker 39:04
I've been here many times but I've never had a chance to spend this much time here and do some teaching like this so it's been really rewarding time. That's awesome. Yep, Prague is on my my bucket list. I hear amazing things about it. An entry has been wonderful That's awesome. Yeah, I It's funny I knew a couple people in my past and I won't name any names but they were amazing chemists and they actually paid off all their their student debt and and and some making psychedelic compounds for so yeah, there's it's definitely a lucrative field for for some people, whether legal or not. Yeah, it so it I wish I had you as a as a teacher. That would be really really really cool, too. You know, I think it's, it's
Unknown Speaker 40:00
It's a changing space where these topics are beginning to be normalized. And it was really cool to see. Even the University of Arlington write, you know, an article about you and your research and just post it on the school's website was awesome. I mean that, especially in Texas, that that's a really big step forward where I think
Unknown Speaker 40:25
it wasn't that long ago that that would be outrageous to see. And you know, there's no way you would be able to do that research, I mean, anywhere in the US, let alone the whole world. So that's a huge step forward to be able to talk to new and upcoming students about this field. And it have legitimacy, not only, you know, in the black market, and it's viewed as some like dirty drug or something like that, it's it has medical importance for treating a lot of people's illnesses and things like that, I think it's,
Unknown Speaker 41:00
it's a really cool time to be in, you know, this, this new frontier into psychedelic research that's legitimized in the western science approach.
Unknown Speaker 41:12
And in our, you know, legal system, it has been legitimized in other circles, but it's cool to see it legitimized and these ones.
Unknown Speaker 41:23
So what is what is your hope?
Unknown Speaker 41:26
For psychedelic research in the future? In terms of, you know, analytical testing and beyond? Where do you where do you see this field progressing in the next 510 years?
Unknown Speaker 41:40
Well, you know, I think, you know, we can we can analyze to our heart's content. And I think it's supremely interesting to be able to understand, you know, like, we know, in different cannabis cultivars, you know, what's all in these different mushrooms? And how is it different among them, and, and I suspect we're gonna likely find, and I think people who would probably have taken different types of mushrooms, they would, you know, say, Okay, this one treats me differently than this one. And so there's something about chemical content that's there, if we can provide a lens to tell you what that chemical content is, that's great.
Unknown Speaker 42:17
But I think our next steps is really trying to help promote more of the clinical testing.
Unknown Speaker 42:23
You know, working together with some researchers in Social Work at UT Arlington, as well as a neuroscience, we want to, we're working on putting together a grant application to National Institutes of Health to study the use of the psilocybin extract from whole mushrooms to treat addiction to treating ultimately PTSD, we have a huge veteran population at UT Arlington, it'll probably take us some years and maybe in that 10 year time frame, we'll be able to start to do more work with humans, but we'll start with work in animals, probably a lot of effort just understanding dosing and and how to deliver an effective dose. But you know, as much as we get more and more researchers working on this, right, the the information will pile in on top of itself, and provide us you know, stronger grounds to take it further to the next level. But as I think you'd think about addiction, pain, anxiety, depression, this is huge. These are all cornerstones of mental health, wellness that we need to address in our society. And so the the promise for the psychedelics, okay, psilocybin mushrooms, I'm very happy to be working on that I would love to be able to next start to work on things like peyote, and some of these other psychedelic compounds that that can have similar effects just to help push that forward.
Unknown Speaker 43:51
But yeah, I think getting more in the work and the clinical side is where this is going to go. And I I told the students today I said, I mean, I can't even imagine what this is going to look like, in 20 years, after we've had some chance to really do that research.
Unknown Speaker 44:08
You know, I, I was just interviewing a couple of scientists from Israel who are doing, I don't know, if you they just published a paper about the difference between
Unknown Speaker 44:18
kind of full spectrum mushrooms versus isolated psilocybin on on various, you know,
Unknown Speaker 44:27
different,
Unknown Speaker 44:29
you know, things that they were studying on mice, but the thing that they said, that I thought was really interesting was, they're like, yeah, one would think that I'm just going to make up numbers like the human weighs 100 kilograms and, and a mice weighs one. So I'm just making up numbers. So if if a human you would give them two grams, you know, you would give the mice a 100th of that, that dose, right. And they're like, no
Unknown Speaker 45:00
A maze has a different metabolism than a human. So you also have to take into account that metabolism. And they said that there's like a calculator online that they use to basically how fast does mice compared to humans metabolize these tryptamines. And they just use the calculator. And that's what they use. And I thought that was really interesting. Because if I was in their shoes, I'd be like, Oh, I would just do it off weight off body weight, and just be like, Oh, mice is this much lighter than a human and average human. So I'm just going to dose dependent on body weight, but obviously, it's metabolism as well. So I just thought that was, you know, give him a little shout out. I thought that was really interesting. When you're, there's great work being done in Israel in this topic. And, and yeah, you know, like I said, I have not done much of that biologic work by myself. And we'll, we'll partner on my side with people who understand those calculations and, and how to do that.
Unknown Speaker 46:03
But yeah, there, it also becomes a very interesting realm to collaborate. And that's, that's very beneficial to have these different expertise has come together, you need to have that to push these things forward. So let's say you did have, you know, unlimited expertise from all around the world, every expert in every single corner, unlimited funds, and every DEA license you could possibly imagine and, you know, all the all the all the red tape disappeared, you had unlimited equipment, every single analytical machine you could possibly imagine, time etc. What would you do?
Unknown Speaker 46:44
Oh, that's, that is a
Unknown Speaker 46:47
nice thing to think about.
Unknown Speaker 46:51
I mean, I,
Unknown Speaker 46:54
you know, I just, I think that the, getting getting to the human side, and doing more work on that side has to, you know, there are there are lots of pharmaceutical companies that are trying to advance these drugs through clinical trials. And it can take, you know, 10s to hundreds and millions dollars to do that. And so you're gonna need all those resources. And then plus, you know, the nature of these kinds of psychedelics and psychotherapy assistance requires more than just giving the drug and lets it, you know, see, you know, measure their metabolism, blah, blah, you have to have all of this psychological support. So much more expensive endeavor.
Unknown Speaker 47:40
But I think, you know,
Unknown Speaker 47:43
the, you'd like to see all this red tape removed, so that you could now really explore the range of ways that we could help humans because, you know, things like substitution treatments, you know, nicotine patches for nicotine, okay, that's a simple one. But you know, think about what opioid addiction like this is a huge problem.
Unknown Speaker 48:05
And to be able to explore these molecules, where you hear anecdotally, that people have really benefited from them, and be able to kind of submit that going forward. I mean, that would be that would be awesome to be a part of, but it is going to be I think, a long road to get there, it's going to take a lot of resources and a lot, a lot of mines to get there.
Unknown Speaker 48:28
And
Unknown Speaker 48:30
do you do you have any advice for
Unknown Speaker 48:34
students that that want to pursue this research, maybe their first years in college, maybe they're, you know, trying to figure out their major, or they're in high school right now listening to this podcast? And they're like, oh, this seems really, really cool. Where do I go to school? Or, you know, how do I pursue this? What classes do I take? What advice do you have for for young up and coming? Scientists?
Unknown Speaker 48:59
You know, I think one of the really nice parts about this topic is that you could go a lot of different routes and still dovetail back into this, you know, from neuroscience from, you know, pharmaceuticals from Okay, analytical side,
Unknown Speaker 49:15
you know, psychological side. So, you know, I obviously, like chemistry, I do feel like that having a chemistry background, even if it's not specialized allows you to understand molecules, and it's, you know, it's molecules in there that are doing things.
Unknown Speaker 49:34
So, you know, I think a solid background in chemistry or whatever flavor that might be the case might be making molecules analyzing molecules, allows you then to take steps off into other directions. You know, I have one of my students who
Unknown Speaker 49:53
is, was working on this mushroom project is, you know, wants to be a neuroscientist. And you know, I think
Unknown Speaker 50:00
Right, that's a great combination, if they're interested in that, and they can understand the chemical side. But, you know, I think that that's just the fact that you can go into a lot of different areas and still be back involved in this topic, if you found it to be compelling,
Unknown Speaker 50:17
is great. So
Unknown Speaker 50:21
you know, it's, you know, follow what's interesting, but you know, give yourself a background that allows you to do those things. And in the end, you got to be able to do something that you love, right? I mean, if I love to run these instruments, and do this analysis, that's my thing.
Unknown Speaker 50:37
You realize what your thing is, and pursue that. Try different things. If you don't know what you like, you know, get involved in undergraduate research university, bounce around a little bit to different groups and see what you like and what you don't like, you know, try some time in industry.
Unknown Speaker 50:56
I think just taking opportunities and seeking opportunities will show you what you like, and then hone in on that pursue it.
Unknown Speaker 51:05
Great, I love it. And where can people continue to follow your work?
Unknown Speaker 51:12
So, you know, I'm, I'm certainly, you know, trying to spread our work, you know, far and wide. You know, we we publish our work in the literature, we presented at conferences, we hope that our university will continue to give press releases on this work. I also tried to write some, you know, less scientifically technical blogs here and there. As I get into more of this research and publish more, I think I will be writing a lot more about that.
Unknown Speaker 51:43
But yeah, there's, you know, I think that there's general outlets, you know, people who can look into the literature, hopefully will come across our stuff more and more, just Googling us.
Unknown Speaker 51:56
Awesome. Well, thank you for, for coming on, all the way from the Czech Republic. And I can't wait to go one day and your students are super lucky to have you talking about this, this field that I think that's really, really cool that we're having more educators in this space, talking about how we can progress this field in the next 510 years plus, and, yeah, it's really about the next generation pushing forward and creating creating a space where we can continue developing this field that you know, veterans and, you know, people with PTSD and, and many, many other things can benefit from, from these mushrooms and beyond so, so thank you for coming on. And thank you everyone for tuning in and tuning in for another episode of the mushroom revival podcast. Wherever you're tuning in from around the world, we could not do this without you. So thank you, if you want to support the show, we don't have a Patreon or any way that you can directly monetarily support but we do have a
Unknown Speaker 53:01
kind of a mother brand mushroom revival. It's a functional mushroom company. And we have organic capsules and powders and tinctures and gummies that you can get from mushroom revival.com. We have a special coupon code just for listeners of the show. And that coupon code is part treat for a surprise coupon code we don't we change it all the time. So kind of figure out what it is. If you don't want to spend any money we have a giveaway going on. We pick a winner once a month where you can win some free functional mushroom products. These are non non psychedelic functional mushrooms, and we ship all around the world.
Unknown Speaker 53:41
And we also have a bunch of free ebooks on our on our website we have a bunch of blogs that we write consistently, all from, you know, education around psilocybin mushrooms containing mushrooms to ecology of fungi to functional mushrooms. Pretty much every everything under the sun relating to fungi, mycology, mushrooms,
Unknown Speaker 54:03
and all of our podcasts are on there, the show notes. If you really like our podcasts as well leave a review that goes a really long way. And then if you learn something in this episode or another episode, just tell your friend tell it tell a family member tell a random person at the grocery store. Tell them a mushroom fun fact and get get the mycelial thread growing and get more people
Unknown Speaker 54:30
excited about mushrooms and fungi and the psychedelic space and really get more conversation starting around around these topics, the better. So with that much love and may the spores be with you
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
