Post by Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology - Hans Knöll Institute

Old toxin, new twist 🍄🔬 Muscarine is one of the best-known mushroom toxins. Yet how fungi produce it has long been misunderstood. A research team led by Dirk Hoffmeister and Sebastian Dörner from Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, in close collaboration with Christian Hertweck and his team at our institute as part of ChemBioSys, has now revised a nearly 50-year-old model of muscarine biosynthesis. Instead of using glutamine as the basic building block, as previously assumed, the team found that the toxin’s biosynthetic pathway starts with the amino acid L-lysine and later also involves L-alanine. This new insight helps us better understand how poisonous mushrooms produce muscarine, knowledge that could one day support improved detection and treatment of mushroom poisoning. The study, recently published in Angewandte Chemie 𝘐𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭 𝘌𝘥𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯, also shows why it is worth questioning established knowledge. Sometimes, looking closely at old assumptions opens up an entirely new path. Congratulations to the entire research team, including Kai Rogge and Felix Trottmann, on this achievement! 👏 Read more about this remarkable research in our press release: https://lnkd.in/d-xUTNHx Access the full publication here: https://lnkd.in/dVRS7DPv 🍄 A small but important note for mushroom foragers: The attached photo shows the St. George’s mushroom, 𝘊𝘢𝘭𝘰𝘤𝘺𝘣𝘦 𝘨𝘢𝘮𝘣𝘰𝘴𝘢, on the left, and the deadly fibrecap, 𝘐𝘯𝘰𝘤𝘺𝘣𝘦 𝘦𝘳𝘶𝘣𝘦𝘴𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘴, on the right. They can look deceptively similar, which is risky because deadly fibrecaps contain high levels of muscarine, the very toxin at the heart of the study. Image credits: Wikimedia Commons (left image: unknown user; right image: Andreas Kunze). Original image sources are listed in the press release.