Where to being with Mycology?

I am also interested for some good info sources on psilocibin mushrooms near the Adriatic sea. (North of Croatia near the sea to be more precise)
Pape as a thank you in advance,

Why not a machine elf?

...

Oчeнь хopoшo ;)

Yea right "organic"
I'm just curious if there exist any fungi with extractable compounds.

If you extract alpha-amanitin you can make a powerful poison that shuts down the activity of RNA Pol II & III

You can't extract magic from magic mushrooms. I know nothing about chemistry but I was able to do a crude extraction, which I subsequently smoked. It's great

see:

take clones from the inner flesh near the basidia

do PCR and gel electrophoresis to amplify/confirm the ITS gene

get it sequenced for ~$8

upload the .fsa to NCBI BLAST to compute genetic distance

many mushrooms contain water- and ethanol-soluble compounds, usu. in the form of polymer chains that comprise cell walls. see grifolan for example

psilocybin is a water-soluble alkaloid

thx

I'm just interested in general, but if I can help catalog (I hike a lot) I'd be more than happy to help.

I suggest looking into bioreactors. It is how we maximize chemical output for various species that produce relevant compounds, or cooler in my opinion, enzymes that can do just about anything.

A quick google scholar search of "bioreactor basidiomycete" or "submerged culture fungal bioactive" should give you tons and tons of articles to sift through. Going by the image you posted though, I'm assuming you're just interested in Psilocybin. Growing the mushrooms is more effective than anything when it comes to production of that compound, since it isn't present in the mycelium until primordia form.

Go ahead and check in with your local mycological society (everyone has one somewhere) and look through their forays. Most societies list the species they find, including Psilocybe if they aren't trimming their results. Unfortunately, a quick search didn't yield a list of the species present in your region. I don't know much about your climate, but if you are temperate you should have a comparable species profile to many others. I'm sure that Psilocybe semilanceata at least grows in your area. Unfortunately that isn't a species I recommend for beginners, since it has so many lookalikes.

All fungi contain extractable compounds, of insane diversity. It all depends on what you want out of them, not only that, but are you looking for stuff to extract from the mycelium, or from the fruiting body? Two different profiles with compounds that play different roles.

Hey! You found me.

You can easily extract the psilo* compounds by boiling the mushrooms. Makes for an interesting blue cocktail that will fuck you up.

OP here, can I take a spore print and grow the mycelin into new shrooms? Also please recommend some reading material.

In my humble opinion, people who sequence and taxonomize species using only ITS, are not contributing much unless they also corroborate their results with morphological features. We have these whole frameworks of species constructs which are founded 100% in genetic distance. This is justifiable in a lot of ways, but you'll often end up with two identical appearing species, with identical ecological roles and chemistry, yet they'll end up in separate genuses for zero apparent reason. Fungi are so genetically diverse (Cough, horizontal gene transfer) that these frameworks are somewhat unstable. Not only that, it isn't uncommon for these researchers to be so green in the field (since it's where the moneys at, they jump right in, skipping field experience) that you'll literally get misidentified species making it into scholarly articles. Trash.

So you're talking about recording and preserving everything you find? Awesome! Herbarium specimens properly dried and stored, with adequate details recorded are very valuable to the field as a whole, no matter how inexperienced you are. It saves people the time doing the fieldwork, basically.

I recommend finding some books that cover your region, and getting in touch with your local mycological society if you can. You'll often find people who are more than happy (if not already working on) projects like this, and they'd be happy to walk you through the basics of identification. Unfortunately, herbarium specimens would ideally be examined on the microscope to confirm your identification. I'm assuming you don't have one. In spite of this, just do your absolute best using the dichotomous keys, and make sure to verify your ID's with an expert, and you'll be fine. Let me see if I can find herbarium specimen catalogue-ing procedures.

What sort of enzymes do you produce with fungi, aside from recombinant enzymes in S. Cerevisiae?

Yes, you can grow from spores, but it is easier to clone a species and go from there. Spores are so genetically diverse, that at the point you have it isolated, you don't actually know if it is genetically capable of producing a fruitbody (mushroom). Clones are guaranteed to be a genetic copy of the specimen you found, so it is already confirmed to have fruiting ability. Thankfully, cloning is actually easier than growing from spore.

There is a steep learning curve, and to do what you're talking about, you're going to need to invest in a basic agar setup.
You can do a basic division of styles of cultivation: indoors and outdoors. Indoors can get you mushrooms in as little as two-three weeks, while outdoors can take up to a year. Outdoors requires little to no investment or labor, while indoors has some startup costs and space requirements.
"Mycelium Running" covers outdoor growing, while "Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms" covers indoor growing. Both by Paul Stamets.

any shroom related forums you visit?

A mind-boggling diversity. Filamentous fungi possess some of the most metabolically diverse enzymes, and arguably the most powerful lytic enzymes. That group being Laccases and Cellulases, enzymes that actually pump out oxygen radicals to blow recalcitrant molecules apart. Many species of mushroom can be trained to eat petroleum products with ease.

It is harder for me to cover all the enzymes they produce, than it would be for me to cover materials they cannot lyse or modify. Obviously, most enzymes in fungi function to destroy things. As far as I know, there are actually no organic molecules on earth that aren't susceptible to fungal enzymes. Even most metals are vulnerable, even in their metallic state. Fungi produce insanely powerful chelating compounds, Aspergillus is actually being used to yank Lithium out of old phone batteries, it has organic acids that will dissolve it into solution, and chelators that pull it into the cell while also rendering it non-cytotoxic.

I frequent "Mushroom Growing" on facebook. It is the best, and most connected forum maybe aside from Shroomery, that I've used. I just can't stand the people on Shroomery. The ability to talk to many experienced people is super convenient, especially for beginners. Not to mention they have countless links to important resources.

Is it true that Paul Stammet's dick shaped like a cubensis?

Ha, are you talking about the "Penis Envy" strain?
I'm not sure where you heard that rumor, but it's pretty funny.

OH GOD IT WAS SPAGHETTI ALL ALONG

I live in a rather dry area, about 2 hours south of texas. I remember that 10 years ago, after a couple of rain days and low temps, mushrooms would grow everywhere. Now due to the hellish heat and lack of humidity its been years since I last saw one.
Last week it rained and snowed for a week and mushrooms are spawning everywhere.

How long can mycelium survive? Also how do psilocybin mushrooms grow on wood? I noticed that an old construction site left a ton of sawed off wood near a damp corner and wavy caps began growing there. Was the mycelium already carried by the wood or is it usually already on the ground but required wood to develop?

Thanks for the great thread btw.

bump for shrooms

Chuck Testa, PhD

Some active Gymnopilus spp. grow on wood in Texas

>In my humble opinion, people who sequence and taxonomize species using only ITS, are not contributing much unless they also corroborate their results with morphological features.
I totally agree, an ITS sequence isn't very useful by itself, but can be with robust morphological/ecological information added as metadata. WGS is the goal, but still prohibitively expensive even for the most serious efforts. At $8 per gene, it's cost the ATCC some $1.5bn to sequence their yeast collection alone (32k strains at ~5.7k genes/strain). Add in HGT like you said and the whole system just collapses. I'd rather participate in some kind of distributed computing project like folding@home but for taxonomy.

The Shroomery is okay if you avoid the main cultivation forum, it's that dickhead bodhisatta leading the blind

>a rain forest in Oaxaca Mexico
I hope you're colonizing their women.

For identifying Psilocybin Mushrooms, particularly Psilocybin Cubensis, your best bet is to actually go to mushroom (drug) forums instead of Mycology forums and groupchats (the one I'm in is actually very studious and they know their shit very well).
I know it may seem daunting to trust that type of thing with what you might consider a druggie, but some mushroom forums online take serious precaution (Shroomery is a good one) and if you're unfamiliar with the 'drug' itself, you'll find an abundance of information there and Erowid.
As for telling the species, be careful, but a thorough examination and set of pictures of the cap and stem (reference online pics) will give you an accurate and safe shot.

Mycology is cool as hell, I hope it gets talked about here often, as I usually don't use this board.

Boiling shrooms is not the best idea from what I have heard, and I'm not trying to be condescending when I ask you to expand upon that, because I have heard that the actual Psilocybe compound degrades rapidly when exposed to high temperatures (which is why you can't smoke them).

the Veeky Forums wiki is broken and there are pages conspicuously missing from it lol

Got Laetiporus gilbertsonii, Coprinus comatus, Lyophyllum sp. , and Hericium abietis. All cloned this season.
Still working on cleaning up cultures from Chlorophyllum brunneum and Agaricus campestris. Also working out media for Leucoagaricus gongylophorus, which has been a goddamn hassle.

I think I'm going to attempt to fruit the Lyophyllum first

Mmmmm sequenced yeast. I am really happy with all the information that's put out with the "1000 fungal genomes" project. I enjoy that projects like that can get funded.
Thankful they chose M. importuna and M. conica, that's for sure.