Oh children of the night i just stumbled onto this ..... what do we think ? Then we wouldnt have to piss around with futile atempts to cultivate certain things or with extracting ceratin seeds .......... ------>

"Harvard scientists to make LSD factory from microbes

Simple microbes such as those found in baker's yeast can be modified to make LSD, suggests research by Harvard scientists

Jake Wintermute wanted to save the world rather than make a pile of money. A PhD student in Pam Silver's synthetic biology lab at Harvard Medical School he worked on biofuels in the hope of one day making them commercial alternatives to fossil fuels.

From time to time, venture capitalists would come by for a chat. They were hard-nosed business types who had an eye on the bottom line and some tough advice to share. They said developing biofuels was a terrible business strategy, because fuel was so cheap. Why not make expensive compounds, like pharmaceuticals, instead?

The advice got Wintermute thinking. What was the most valuable compound they could make with the toolkit of synthetic biology? Some research came up with a few candidates including a few very sophisticated cancer drugs. But another compound was up there in monetary terms: LSD. The value by weight was astronomical.

Wintermute and his colleagues had a good laugh about that. But the more they looked into it, the more interesting - and viable - the drug looked. Around 20 tonnes of lysergic acid, a precursor of LSD, are made each year and turned into real medicines, such as nicergoline, a treatment for dementia. The drug is purified from big vats of fungus (which make the compound naturally) using technology developed decades ago.

With the tools of synthetic biology, Wintermute thought they might do better. The ergot fungus takes lysergic acid and turns it into a huge variety of exotic molecules. They could mix and match biological pathways from different species of ergot fungus and make potentially new drug molecules. They might even come up with a next generation dementia drug.

Wintermute gave an update on the project last week at the Synthetic Biology 5 conference at Stanford University. As yet he is not making any lysergic acid, but he has dropped two of the six required biological pathways into baker's yeast, which merrily churns out intermediate compounds. At a rough estimate, he expects a litre of modified yeast in broth will produce a gram of lysergic acid. Once made inside the yeast, the drug should pass through the cell walls, where it can be separated out and purified.

This could be the first step towards a new living factory for making LSD, and thanks to previous experience with microbes, scaling up this kind of technology should not be too arduous for the pharmaceutical industry. The work brings to mind a more developed effort by Jay Keasling and others to engineer microbes to churn out useful biofuel components.

Wintermute's work was just one project that got some attention at the SynBio5 conference. Another line of work that caught my eye addressed one of the main concerns over synthetic biology, which is unintended release and potential harm caused by engineered organisms. One way to do this is to make organisms that use genetic material that differs from DNA and RNA. Do this and you can make what people like Markus Schmidt at the Organisation for International Dialogue and Conflict Management in Austria, call "orthogonal life", or organisms that are isolated from the natural environment by virtue of what amounts to a genetic firewall. How well it might work is so far unknown.

An intriguing point raised by Wintermute is that as synthetic biology procedures get cheaper, it will become inevitable for people to replicate and share stuff for free. Once upon a time we used to worry about - or take advantage of - online file sharing. Will the sharing of biological materials bring problems of its own?

These are early days for synthetic biology, but conferences like SynBio5 give us a glimpse of the potential this technology has. One announcement at the meeting came from DARPA, the pentagon funding body that backs high-risk research, in which the agency declared they are getting into synthetic biology in a big way. The ball will soon be rolling. Next week, DARPA is holding a Living Foundries industry day, where synthetic biologists can pitch their big ideas."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2011/jun/21/scientists-make-lsd-from-microbes

I agree ...... BUT ...... thats where good people are at = tying to find ways of getting to Lysergic acid . This would seem ...... at least to me ........ to be the most sensible ? / productive ? / easy ? way to it .  And harvard isnt behind barbed wire fences and the labs arent thief proof safes . Maybe it takes a bit but i think that this is the most promising way to go i`ve seen so far .

At least some of you lot with lab brains should bkeeping an eye on this and also looking into the possibilitys of doing it .

They were realy saying LSD not MTV ----< http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlPjxz4LGak

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1ZYhVpdXbQ

Obviously not "easy" for the hobbyist to do the whole thing but once someone got or that yeast ...."escaped" .........  from the lab it would be a piece of piss to multiply it and then extract it . As easy as makeing wine or beer ? One questioon would of cource be is the changed yeast stabil in its content from generation to generation . But once industry got it and its use spread around the world it wouldnt be hard to get .

I`m not saying a person with your skills coulnt / wouldnt get some  lysergic acid from ergot cultures because i am sure that IF you were doing it you would sucseed ......... BUT ...... AGAIN ........ how many tries , how much time , how much cost , how much effort , how much risk and risk over time and in the end a few thousand doses for personal use ........... cool achievement as a hobby but ........ sorry ...... still playing post offices ......... and your one in a million ......once the lab yeast is made and escapes even a dickhead like me could culture it .

As far as the genetic work is concerned ok its probably not easy to get the right DNA and get it into yeast but for someone with the right skills i think its doable even without harvard ....I mean look how many forensic labs are extracting DNA from evidence and then multiplying it ? = LOADS


<-------- ya gotta forgive and read round my lack of knowledge about genetics and big words but your bright enough to do that ................. and to see that in the near future the yeast route will be the one people will be going ..........


I`m not sure exactly how it would be done ? Just extractb the DNA from ergot and plant it in yeast ? Or would one have to find the part of the ergot DNA responsible for produceing the goods and then splice it into / with yeast DNA ? <-------- see pure ignorance ...... please feel free to rain on my parade .........

I'll certainly consider this route in the near future.

If you get all the stuff to modify yeast to make lysergamides, might as well pop out a few other relatives; morphine yeast, cocaine yeast, THC yeast, etc.

What would be nice is to modify not a yeast, but an endophyte - it would make for easier distribution, and lead to increased methods of production of the various compounds.

Start a small ornamental grass company after the fact.

aniracetam ......Thanks for takeing the time to explain that to me i`ll look at the site you mentioned . I wish some of the members / moderators here had the intelligence like you do to understand what i`m trying to get over and therby not stumble over their own egos and bitch and moan at me . I think for a person with so little education  i do quite well ...... if people are as balanced as you are .

With the multiplying genetic samples i was thinking of the spots on TV i have seen where lab assistants have trest tubes with a gooey opaque ....... goo ......DNA ....... that has been reproduced / multiplyed from very small samples . I havent got a clue how its done but i thought that if they can do it then its not out of the scope of people like you with the resources you seem to have .

I shall have a read .

As to endophyte / s .... what would be the advantage ? That they ocure and multiply naturaly on their own = once they were engineered and set free they would be unstopable ?

So i`m not that far off ....... thanks for the conmfirmation ........ my ego just came out from hideing under the table in the dark .......... . Things have come a long way since the 70s and my failed atempts to grow ergot on sterilised rye . The level of science and ideas that are around now would have seemed like magic then .

I`m hungry for info and ideas about this ....... has anyone got any more mental fodder / ideas / comments on the subject ?

from what i gathered it took big pharma 40 years and screening of 10's of thousands of mutations to get c. purpurea to produce significant amounts of ergot alkaloids in saprophytic culture.
c. paspali is easier because the structures of the ergolines are relatively simple and water solubility is a big factor too.
for instance ergotamine et. al. are'nt soluble so they stay in the cell matrix while lysegic acid amide are, so it gets transported out and more can be made in the cell structure.
i'd bet on c. paspali any day of the week.

well, because the implication is this: GE allows for more controllable expression at the genetic level, as opposed to "roll of the dice" approach to mutating a strain that has "degenerated". the application of GE allows the experimenter to induce gene expression at the basal level with little hassle. With the claviceps fungus, you have to add some  mutagenic chemicals in relatively large amounts (compared to the microliter amounts you may  add in GE), to the liquid culture. Even then, there's no guarantee after all that waiting, that the fungus can be coaxed to produce any significant amount.  the good news is that at least the gene is present in the claviceps fungus...and that can be cloned into s.cereviceae (a model organism), then activated under the same conditions as the claviceps fungus (sugar saturated solution).

given the options of gene cloning into yeast and  culturing from a producing strain, I'd choose both.

don't piss in my pocket and tell me it's raining 

yea, paspali is definitely the way to go. it has less of the nasty ergotoxines that purpurea has, and
produces primarily simple lysergic/isolysergic derivatives. pretty easy fungus to work with.

store-bought baker's/brewer's yeast can be used for cloning experiments, or you could get 'lab-grade' yeast. doesn't matter..it's all Saccharomyces Cereviceae

An agreeable, easily cultivated organism producing uncontaminated LA would solve the daunting precursor issues.

We can hope this happens, that it happens soon, and that a culture escapes into the underground. This would open the floodgates. This would be game over for precursor control if it could reach even one brotherly acid chemist.