[chasebank]

Indeed it is.

As someone who’s been encapsulating magic mushrooms for 10+ years, what I’d really love to see is an easy way to extract psilocybin for a more accurate measurement of the compound. Encapsulated mushrooms work ok but sometimes it can be orders of magnitude different in potency. Like you think you’re drinking a beer and accidentally drank 3 margaritas. I’ve read that people are working on deriving psilocybin from yeast but haven’t heard much as of late.

Fwiw, I think mushrooms at low quantities might be the best drug of all time, even better than caffeine. Happy pills, I tell ya!

[retrac]

> I’ve read that people are working on deriving psilocybin from yeast but haven’t heard much as of late.

They were successful. A team at the Technical University of Denmark inserted the genes to synthesize psilocybin into Saccharomyces cerevisiae (brewer's yeast) [1] and they had excellent yields:

> a final production strain producing 627 ± 140 mg/L of psilocybin and 580 ± 276 mg/L of the dephosphorylated degradation product psilocin in triplicate controlled fed-batch fermentations

It's likely the means it will be produced commercially if it becomes a widely-approved drug. Not sure the average person will be able to get their hands on that strain easily anytime soon though. I imagine it'll be guarded as a trade secret as strictly as those modified E. coli that pump out human insulin.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109671761...

[s1artibartfast]

The best I can think of for consistency short of measurement is homogenization to make an average. This goes for many products. Blend the individual items, batches, ect. The larger the quantity, the more consistent the output.

[nibbleshifter]

Soxhlet extraction into ethanol might be promising for this (higher efficiency compared to soak and strain).

Just need to see if the elevated temp over a period of a couple of hours negatively impacts potency I guess.