Miraculix Community Research

The term Entourage Effect was first established by Dr. Ethan Russo and comes primarily from research on the cannabis plant. The hypothesis here is that the combination of various cannabinoids, terpenes, and other metabolites strongly influences the effect of the main active ingredient THC (Russo, 2011).

Why should this now play a role in psilocybin-containing mushrooms?

Significant research by our scientist Dr. Felix Blei found that magic mushrooms contain many other compounds besides tryptamine alkaloids, such as potentially active secondary metabolites like harmane and harmine (Blei et al., 2020). Additionally, there are also several (as yet) undiscovered terpenes in the chemical repertoire of these mushrooms (Scháfer et al., 2023). This is particularly exciting as minor mono- and sesquiterpenes in cannabis seem to modulate the activity of major psychotropic metabolites (Booth et al., 2017).

The Entourage Effect presents an interesting avenue for future research. Together with recent advancements in clinical research on psilocybin as an alternative treatment for mental health disorders (Daniel & Haberman, 2017; Roseman et al., 2018), some critical questions arise: 

Do the (therapeutic) effects of different species of magic mushrooms differ from those of pure psilocybin? Do different strains of magic mushrooms have different therapeutic potential? Will future psychedelic therapy use the whole fungus or isolated psilocybin? If you had the choice, would you, like many medical cannabis patients, prefer a full-spectrum administration over a single agent? 

These are the questions we are trying to answer with our community research project!

In a collaboration between the University of Jena and the local HKI and MPI, Eike Schäfer and colleagues were able to show the production of over nine different terpenes, including β-copaene and δ-cadinene in the fruiting bodies of Psilocybe cubensis. You can see which terpenes were also found in the in-vitro product assays of P. cubensis in the graphic. 

However, it was not only possible to detect these terpenes, but also how the fungi produce these known natural substances. The enzyme CubA was identified as a multifunctional sesquiterpene synthase. CubA was four-fold upregulated in fruiting bodies vs. vegetative mycelium, which pointed to a function of this gene in the mushrooms.