MycoMinds

Lanmaoa asiatica (兰茂牛肝菌，俗称””红葱””) is one of the most common edible boletes in Yunnan, widely distributed in southeastern China and popular for its flavorful smell and delicious crunchy taste. In additionq, it is also commonly known that these boletes need to properly cooked before consumption, and various clinical case studies reported visual hallucination and delirium-like symptoms following consumption of Lanmaoa asiatica, supposedly undercooked. Urban myths surrounding these mushrooms typically involve seeing “”little people””, or lilliputian hallucination, following consumption, which further validates the visual hallucination theory. However, no known psychoactive substances were identified in Lanmaoa asiatica yet, and previous research work utilizing BLAST search to align the Lanmaoa asiatica genome with known psychedelic-producing pathways–the psilocybin and muscimol biosynthetic pathways–yielded no significant results, indicating that the psychoactive substance in Lanmaoa asiatiaca might not fall into these 2 known categories of fungi-produced psychoactive substances. Therefore, in this project, we aim to identify the psychoactive substance responsible for Lanmaoa asiatica’s hallucigenic effects, and/or elucidate its mechanism of function.