Most of us associate yeast as the key ingredient for making bread. Of course beer and wine also rely on yeast to convert sugar into alcohol.
More recently, yeast has been used to create THC, CBD, and several other cannabinoids in laboratories. This has allowed scientists to create ‘lab grown’ cannabis products.
Now, a synthetic biology company is using yeast to create psychedelics. More specifically, these psychedelics are psilocybin, which is usually found in more commonly known ‘magic mushrooms’.
Octarine, based in Denmark, is working on a variety of methods to synthetically produce psilocybin in a sustainable and scalable fashion. This would allow future pharmaceutical products to have a reliable and consistent supply of psychedelic substances.
Octarine is certainly worth keeping an eye on, as more pharmaceutical companies consume psilocybin for research projects with the hopes of productizing the psychedelic for medical uses.