Modified E. coli pump out psilocybin
C&EN Global Enterprise October 7, 2019 Megha Satyanarayana
A team of chemical engineers engineered the bacterium Escherichia coli to produce large quantities of psilocybin, the psychoactive compound in magic mushrooms. The work, published in Metabolic Engineering, addresses the challenge of manufacturing psilocybin as it enters clinical trials for depression and other brain conditions. The fungal enzymatic pathway for psilocybin was only described in 2017; it starts with a tryptophan-based compound and ends with a phosphorylated product. The phosphate group is unstable in synthetic chemistry but readily added by biological systems, and in the human body it is removed to form psilocin, which crosses the blood-brain barrier.