[alexibm]

I'm so tired of comments like "startup is disrupting the [xyz] industry." No they don't disrupting anything. They didn't invent anything. They are just planning to grow and sell mushrooms. Growing mushrooms is well know process.

[abrookewood]

They aren't planning on growing anything ... they have to synthesize the compound as the 'grown' versions are not pure enough for the FDA.

[eindiran]

Even though that's the case, what they're doing isn't novel. There are a number of syntheses for psilocybin that are well known in the literature that are potentially suitable for industrial production. In fact, there are a few available in Shulgin's famous TiHKAL. It seems quite unlikely to me that the synthesis they will be doing is novel or "disruptive" in any way.

[skilled]

That sounds dumb. Any citation on why it's so?

[eindiran]

I don't have a citation for you, but the mechanism here is that it's difficult to extract just the alkaloid you want when a plant has a number of chemically similar alkaloids. So when you do an extraction, you get a number of different compounds, often mixed in slightly different proportions.