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Genetic Linkage

Examining The Curious Genes Behind “Magic Mushrooms”

"One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small," sang Grace Slick in Jefferson Airplane’s classic White Rabbit, conjuring images of Alice in Wonderland in Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel. But Alice also nibbled a mushroom to grow taller or smaller, following the advice of a hookah-smoking caterpillar perched atop the fungus.

Alice might have munched one of the 200 species of mushroom that produce psilocybin, a hallucinogen. A recent article in Evolution Letters, from Jason Slot, an assistant professor of fungal evolutionary genomics at The Ohio State University and co-workers, reports the sequencing of the genomes of three species of psychedelic mushrooms: Psilocybe cyanescens, Gymnopilus dilepis, and Panaeolus cyanescensRead More 
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