that's nice, i've had some real good replies to topics here, and not a lot of cynical replies commenting on how i know basically and should learn more before asking.

i'm asking to know, if i wanted to look up crap on the internet, i'd look it up on the internet, not ask in a discussional forum.

i had a lot of criticism when i proposed the idea of lsd found or synthesized in nature at the shroomery. I finally got a shitload of answers from people about the enzymes that change paspalic acid into a biosynthetic path forming elymoclavine i believe it was and then into lysergic acid originally from tryptophan. To synthesize lsd you'd need a specific enzyme to catalyse lysergic acid into lysergic acid diethylamine.

this seemed simple enough to me concerning that lysergic acid is made into lysergic acid amide and lysergic acid hydroxyethylamide simple enough. But that's because of ancient enzymes. It would be difficult to produce one making lsd especially since i think diethylamine and triethylamine and any amine further compounded from one amine is very rare in nature. add to that that i add that finding out if lsd any beneficial function to claviceps or argeryia nervosa would be beneficial. but that alkaloids are consisted on a basis of secondary metabolism, which is an evolutionary relic in the life stage of the plant. I don't think people could see what function alkaloids like lsa and ergotoids and such would help with the plant, exept to prevent infection or something.

anyway it was an idea i suggested, but got shot down pretty hard. So far i haven't been flamed pointlessly for ideas i've presented on this site. Well
peace

come to think of it, how many plants have not been discovered yet? is it thousands? or millions?

maybe there's a already a plant that produces lsd or mdma or 2-ci or something.

well many thousands of plants have been identified. however a fun thing is that most of these plants have never ever been tested for their secondary metabolite make up. means theres a lot of fun work to be done in that regard. however yes it is theoretically possible that a plant could make LSD.

however you must think on an evolutionary scale. why would a plant incorporate iodine into a phenylethylamine structure. its just not practical in terms of enzymatic catalysis. its really that simple. perhaps in the ocean this may happen because iodine is all over the place and enzymes in the ocean are more equipped to deal with large atoms like that. also LSD is not a stable substance. it doesn't make much sense for a plant to make it and even if some plant somewhere in the past made it theres no reason to keep that gene going. because the substance just breaks down as soon as its exposed to bright sunlight. and then their is the problem of how enzymes have currently evolved they aren't dealing with the same kind of substances people can make in a laboratory.




these compounds have many many roles. some is to attract / kill insects. i can go on about examples of all types of reasons for all kinds of secondary metabolites if you would like just ask for something you are curious about.

however i think a simple answer is that plants have no other way of interacting with their outside environment without chemical signals. so a plant makes a lot of chemicals during evolution and at certain points useless ones are no longer made and those genes fall out of function, but new ones are always being made to deal with new bugs new animals etc. animals can run jump climb swim (they also rely on chemical signalling but the nervous system deals with a lot of that). this is no relic this is a fundamental part of how plants interact with the world around them.

fascinating. Well, what about the appendix or tonsils? these are useless yet still remain. but no matter what I guess there could be many examples of things people don't know about yet.

I'd like to know what purpose lysergic acids, mescaline, and psilocybin have as alkaloids.

I seem to have this obsession with thinking lsd could be found in nature. Maybe it's just how natural it feels in your mind, and since it seems to activate your receptors with such accuracy, it seems suprising to me that's not already a bioorganic molecule. I know it would break down very easily, aren't there other molecules that break down easily as well, and are reproduced? so it would either be made in a fast growing plant(like woodrose) or in something growing in little or no sunlight, like a nothern forest floor plant, or a fungus that didn't grow in sunlight.

lsd may never be seen in nature(unless you consider people a part of the creating existence of nature, and that people synthesized it, which is true), but it still suprises me for some reason. i guess there's a logical explanation though. I'm sure there are other organic molecules with only the human body creates which are probably never seen in a plant.

what suprises me is the vast amount of molecules similar, and ALMOST EXACT, such as lysergic acid hydroxyethylamide. You know? maybe the instability of it is what prevents it from having ever been made. i guess that would sense, probably a really sensitive molecule would be something that would so easily trigger a delicate and basic part of the human brain.

tell me, no such plants grow in such delicate ways? really easy to kill, sensitive, and maybe having produced molecules that are very sensitive and break down easily and quickly such as lsd?

just curious

It is found in nature, much like cacti use mescaline as a bug repellent. we have to use it to help reconnect us to nature.

what do you mean by 'It IS found in nature'?

it makes no difference whether molecules come from plants or human synthesis assuming you can achieve the same level or purity there is NO difference its a molecule. something purified from a plant assuming you had the exact same isomer and purity as something you synthetically synthesized is the same. people synthesized a whole range of compounds that are just as active if not more active on the human mind then things currently found in nature. LSD is an example of this. it does not matter if it exists in some obscure fungus human beings have never encountered or tested that doesn't make it any less or more special.



they simply haven't had time to evolve away. that also doesnt mean they are totally useless they just dont have a necessary function in our modern society and we are not facing strong evolutionary pressure to lose these organs. we have surgery so you don't die if something goes wrong with them.



many many plants grow in delicate ways. i should correct myself just because its not stable doesnt mean it would not exist in a plant or fungus or whatever. many many "natural" compounds are not stable. in many cases the breakdown product is the one that gets you high or kills you! think about psilocybin doesnt do anything to you but psilocin does.

i just want to make this point about evolution. plants don't make molecules because they know they are going to be biologically active. plants have no way of knowing this. when different forms of life first started to evolve it had to make ways to fight off and kill other life or attract other life or breakdown other life. life has no way of knowing whether a chemical made by it will do anything. this happens through co-evolution.

lets start with one single stupid bacteria. then through random mutations happening over a long period of time because DNA replication is imperfect and you get a new bacteria that can coincidently produce a chemical to make it better able to eat the "food" substrate. many of the first bacteria will start to die off except the few that evolve mutations to produce some defense chemical or break down the chemical being produced by the other. now imagine this happening on a massive scale throughout billions of years of evolution.

thats the only reason these compounds exist. if you put a bacteria in a totally safe happy environment eventually new bacteria formed from random mutation that only focused on cell growth would dominate over previous one. that does not mean that all this evolution is such a step by step process either. if a plant has an enzyme that can catalyze numerous reactions from one essential precursor and make 10 different alkaloids and 5 of them are active against a variety of predators it would be better off then the plant that has an enzyme that only produces 1 alkaloid but that one happens to not be active. assuming everything else about the two plants is the exact same. this is very simplified example.

another thing think about when you put plants in cell culture. its totally happy it gets all the sugar it needs it just grows has no enemies. most of the time the plant barely produces any secondary metabolites unless your provoke it (if you can figure out how to trick it). some genes are constitutively expressed and unless they are silenced by some other environmental condition will always make stuff. its all genetic and environmental control.

plants don't make DMT, cannabinoids, ergot alkaloids, mescaline to make humans happy. if human beings eat all the peyote cacti the only ones that will survive are the ones that produce some other alkaloids that we cannot tolerate. human beings can breed cacti to make more mescaline and less other alkaloids which happens in many examples of human plant cultivation. sometimes humans breed plants to become resistant to fungi and it winds up the chemical the plant was making to kill the fungi also make human sick.

i do not mean to give long elaborate explanations to anyones points or questions this is just the most logical and backed up way things work. im trying to show you there are other ways to think about these questions you are posing.

Human beings have evolved to a point of creating some of these compounds.

burnt, i understand what you are trying to say completely. The thing i always thought, that people can never seem to agree with, i guess has no scientific base, but goes something like along organic possibilities:

i always thought that if something followed an organic pathway, that it had a higher possibility of being found in nature, this obviously isn't true. different animals have different organic metabolic pathway base systems or whatnot. They aren't all rooted in the basic fundamental science of plant or cell growth, they have complex organic chemistry unique to their life essence. Rabbits can eat some amanita muscaria, things like chocolate are poisonous to dogs in large amounts. Dogs can eat raw meat and not get sick, higher amounts of enzymes in their stomach that break down and kill raw bacteria and viruses i suppose.

there are tons of poisons found in nature, not healthy to humans, of course, tha plants might have CREATED those poisons on purpose, but that's not completely likely, exept those poisons that stop atp synthesis and cell regrowth and crap like that, which i don't know how a plant can metabolize, without poisoning itself.

still though, it does interest me to think that people can play with evolution. You could start a cell growth medium, and feed large amounts of lsd to it, and see if you couldn't mix a gene transcription technique. Maybe you could feed it something that the plant would turn to lsd to survive. But who is going to feed all that lsd to a something like that. Unless you could put it in a growth medium and feed it way more small amounts. But then still who has the time for something like that. Anyway............

oh well, dna transformation would probably be the best way, and still i'm sure no one's funding the research to biorganically synthesize that enzyme.

besides the fact that most of the things you said in your last post do not really make sense i do not understand the point your driving at anymore.

if you are interested in plant secondary metabolism by a book on it and read it.

there's a reason i'm taking writing classes.

what I'm trying to say is.

it always made sense to me, if something is organic, and works in a person, it should be found in nature. This isn't necessarily true, because you can find all types of shit in nature that won't work in you, and vice versa.

then i was saying it'd be interesting if you could somehow genetically enhance a plant to NEED lsd, and therefore the plant could learn to adapt and produce it. I don't even know if this is possible.

then i say to get that enzyme, no ones going to fund the bioresearch to synthesize that enzyme. Oh well

i didn't mean to get harse on ya hah. but yea its theoretically possible engineer enzymes to catalyze different reactions but this science is still in its infancy. and it would not be necessary in the case of LSD because its relatively easy to synthesize. however genetically engineering a plant to need lsd is not possible.

you think so? what if proved to have some key value in a plant as well as it does in a human? i guess the chances of that are probably a million to one, but still, what if.

LSD does not have a key value in a human. it binds to receptors in our brain and alters them. Signalling in the brain changes etc etc. Thats it. Hoffman when making LSD was looking for biologically active compounds for migraine and other purposes. he happened to find LSD was psychoactive. Thats all. If you administer LSD to a plant nothing will happen. A plant does not have 5-HT receptors. Maybe it could cause cellular damage in high doses but thats not even relavent.

you sure? lysergic acid amide has a purpose, lysergic acid hydroxyethylamide has a purpose, why wouldn't lysergic acid diethylamide? even if only as useful as lysergic acid amide, you never know, PLUS, what if a plant developed enzymes to create larger molecules from lsd, although i doubt that'll happen.

tell me, when you do genetic transcription, and take a cell from a plant, and grow a completely new plant from it, it doesn't go into a phase where it readies itself for rapid evolution does it? have they found a way to get plants to produce new things or grow and evolve using genetic transcription, besides gene splicing? i guess they would, if they can get plants to create new enzymes, but they do that with protein folding. Is there a way to get the plant to do stuff like that all by itself?

lysergic acid and these kind of alkaloids serve as defense or communication compounds. imagine you were a small mouse and you ate seeds of morning glory. you would get sick and wouldnt want to eat it again. humans on the other hand can tolerate larger doses and seem to like to tripping part. all im trying to say is no plant or fungus has ever been found to make LSD that does not mean its totally 100% impossible.




i think you mean genetic engineering. gene transcription is when DNA is made into RNA which is constantly happening in all cells and is totally normal. during genetic engineering you often to takes cells from a plant and insert genes into them and then try to regenerate a whole plant from that cell using hormones and certain culture media. your mixing up some terms so let me clarify. if you add a gene into a plant with an effective promoter it would be transcribed and make RNA that RNA will them be used to make a protein. that protein will then hopefully do something you wanted. protein folding is sometimes controlled by other enzymes but also is a natural process of amino acids and their chemical interactions folding together to form a stable molecule. plants do this ALL THE TIME. every time they sexually reproduce new genes can be made etc. thats how evolution works.

also realize: there are four stereoisomers of LSD, only one is active.
(the semi-synthetic we all know and love)

I thought they were all active, but to different extents.

no.
iso-lsd is inactive

wow, that's crazy, huh?