Psychedelic Biosynthesis. As noted in the previous post, the psychedelic compound psilocybin, naturally produced by “magic mushrooms“, has recently been biosynthesized “in high yields” in the laboratory via genetic engineering (see Ref. 1 below). By first isolating the genes involved in psilocybin biosynthesis from “magic mushrooms” in the genus Psilocybe,…
“Strawberry Fields Forever”. Thanks to this 1967 Beatles song (see below), strawberries may sometimes be associated with psychedelia, especially to people of a certain age (i.e., old farts like me). This comes to mind because psychedelic drugs have been in the news recently thanks to the publication of a popular…
What This Book Is….And Isn’t. The original version of this ebook started out, in 2013, as a compilation of some blog posts from this website. In linking these posts together, I found I needed to expand and update a lot of the information, which resulted in the first edition. Plant…
From Plant Secrets To Plant Antibiotics What were the five most re-tweeted and favorited plant news stories that I shared in September of last year? Well, here they are, in order of popularity, lowest to highest. “Scientists from the John Innes Centre have pioneered innovative new cell imaging techniques to…
From Very, Very Old Plants To New Uses For Plants It’s been an unusually cold winter here in the upper left-hand corner of the USA, so it’s pleasant to recall the warm days of June 2016. That month, the plant news topics ranged from ancient plants to new, exciting uses…
From Blocking Pollen To Blocking Disease If there was a recurring theme in the March 2016 plant news it may have been plant defense. Defense against foreign genes, defense against herbivores, and defense against disease all made an appearance. “Contamination of organic corn by genetically modified pollen is a major…
“Double helix in the sky tonight Throw out the hardware Let’s do it right” – Steely Dan Here A CRISPR, There A CRISPR, Everywhere A CRISPR, CRISPR…. Yikes! You can hardly go through a week these days without reading some headline with “CRISPR” in the title. (Even in Time magazine!)…
Firstly, What Is A Roundup Ready® Crop? Well, let’s start out with: What’s Roundup®? Briefly, Roundup® is the commercial name for the herbicide glyphosate, first made and sold by Monsanto in the 1970’s. You can read more about Roundup® HERE. “Roundup Ready®” is Monsanto’s trade name for crops (soybean, maize,…
From Decaf Coffee Plants To Non-Browning Apples Have you ever had a really good cup of decaf coffee? Me neither. This is likely because most decaf coffee results from chemical processing of normal coffee beans. But why would anyone want coffee without caffeine? And why do plants make caffeine in…
Plant-Based Vaccines – A Great Idea It’s been over 20 years since I introduced students in my plant sciences classes to the idea of using genetically-engineered plants (GMOs) as a source of edible vaccines. Basically, the idea was that some crop plants could be genetically engineered to produce vaccines in…