Every year, doctors at a hospital in the Yunnan Province of China brace themselves for an influx of people with an unusual complaint. The patients come with a strikingly odd symptom: visions of pint-sized, elf-like figures – marching under doors, crawling up walls and clinging to furniture.The hospital treats hundreds of these cases every year. All share a common culprit: Lanmaoa asiatica, a type of mushroom that forms symbiotic relationships with pine trees in nearby forests and is a locally popular food, known for its savory, umami-packed flavor. In Yunnan, L. asiatica is sold in markets, it appears on restaurant menus and is served at home during peak mushroom season between June and August.One must be careful to cook it thoroughly, though, otherwise the hallucinations will set in."At a mushroom hot pot restaurant there, the server set a timer for 15 minutes and warned us, 'Don't eat it until the timer goes off or you might see little people,'" says Colin Domnauer, a doctoral candidate in biology at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah, who is studying L. asiatica. "It seems like very common knowledge in the culture there."
Read the whole thing. Very curious to know what the compound is.
I wonder if this is the origin of folklore about elves, gnomes, etc. Seems to be a common thing across cultures.
ReplyDeletemy guess would be something very specific to one brain center, some serotonin receptor agonist which binds in a covalent fashion (hence the very long duration of effect), something containing ring-modified tryptophan that gets actively transported into brain and turned into a tryptamine analog. Something that is incorporated as a non-canonic aminoacid into the mushroom protein and that is why it has neem difficult to identify (I suggest trying enzymatic hydrolysate LC/MS). Long cooking eventually degrades it by oxidation/hydrolysis but it takes time
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