Twilight Person wrote:I think it would be interesting to see if indeed some rare occasions might happen when bufotenin in A. colubrina hits like 6 % - this really weird literature value once found ...
To me that just sounds weird: How and why would a plant produce a considerable amount of its own seed weight in just 1 alkaloid substance and stuff it inside of those seeds? Which are anyways already pretty space-limited, regarding they have to fit inside everything that the seedling even needs for germination. I always see it when reading something about Bufotenin on Erowid and so on. But it just sounds unrealistic? Today we have weed with ~ 30 % THC nearly, but that is the end of an ever-ongoing crazy race of artificial breeding.
That is a great question and something that crossed my mind too. Bear in mind that certain mushrooms can contain up to 3.85% of psilocybin which is in a similar ball-park range. And we can speculate endlessly (
) about the reasons behind that as well.
Quote:And about sourcing Mushrooms for Bufotenin I think they are mostly just contained in really toxic specimens? Like the yellow phalloids. So probably hard to every get them out of those toxins, where you have always a cocktail of quite-similar isomers anyways
One of the other trivial names for bufotenine is mappine, which derives from its being detected in what at the time was known as Amanita mappa. This is a now-deprecated name for Amanita citrina and, while this fungus does contain detectable quantities of amanitin these are not sufficient to make it overtly dangerous.
https://en.wikipedia.org...Amanita_citrina#ToxicityHowever, given the tiny quantities of bufotenine found in these mushrooms it would be necessary to gather a huge amount of them in order to extract any significant amount of bufotenine. Add to that that they are a mycorrhizal species and that means that essentially only wild collecting would be a 'viable' if wholly unsustainble option - not to mention the overarching danger of confusing them with something truly toxic like A. phalloides.
Yes, we still need to find viable plants!
Quote:I saw some fungi toxins which were quaternary amines, like methyl-dimethylamines. I wonder if those are mostly causing the toxicicity because they look pretty close to Cholin from Acetyl-Cholin. And eating something that has an uncontrollable resemblence of a neurotransmitter may only end pretty badly.
Yes, studies have also shown that aeruginascin displays activity in the cholinergic nervous system, as do quaternary alkaloids from cactus such as candicine.
Quote:I guess that is the reason why smoking the Toad Venom is the only way: Quaternary amines (also present in toads not only fungi) will probably not vaporize due to their ionic nature?
They won't volatilise unchanged but quaternary amines like this (indolylethyl trimethylammonium compounds to be more precise - "methyl dimethyl[...]" == trimethyl...) will pyrolise to the vinylindole (or potentially derivatives thereof such as the tryptophol) and trimethylamine.
The other reason for smoking toad venom rather than eating it is that it contains cardiotoxic steroidal glycosides which are similarly involatile.
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