MANY UPDATES, the Cultivar Cup & an Answer to Question About Print Caps (Patreon)

I know I've been pretty quiet lately, but that does not mean the research or video making has stopped, so here are some updates:

1) I promised a vid about thin layer chromatography for alkaloid analysis, which is a work in progress, I've been debating how much I want to put into one vid vs. putting out several shorter vids.  Decided to plan on doing some new demonstrations with this before wrapping it up.

2) I had mentioned in my pan cyan vid that I would like to do potency testing on the print caps (shown in vid) to see if they are still potent and can be used for anything.  The above picture is the result of that testing.  It is somewhat well documented that a mushroom will lose alkaloids as the caps move into the spore formation stage, so you would normally want to harvest before they start dropping spores.  Additionally, I would expect there to be alkaloid losses just from leaving the moist caps sitting around for 2 days in an oxygen rich environment with no protections during the printing period.  I was actually somewhat surprised that the caps remain relatively potent even after printing as can be seen in the picture above (print caps are the right column, pre-spore normal harvest mushrooms dried immediately after harvest and properly stored are in the left column).  It looks like the print caps lose about 40% of the psilocybin and at least 50% of the psilocin.  No baeocystin is lost.  While these losses may seem pretty large, the end result is still more potent than most strong cubensis mushrooms.  So there you have it... as long as the caps are in tact and not stinky or mushy, you can go ahead and dry and use them if you'd like, just don't expect the same level of potency as properly processed fruit.

3) Speaking of potency testing, I'm actually QUITE EXCITED about something big happening behind the scenes recently... there is a new East Coast (US) lab doing state of the art mushroom testing (alkaloid analysis and more) using high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC).  You can read more about what they are doing here: https://magicmyco.org/ They have also started (and even trademarked) "The Cultivar Cup" which will be a biannual (June and December solstices) friendly competition of sorts where people can enter samples for testing and have results published in a public report.  This could help the community gain new insights on the medicinal compounds in various species of mushrooms and may contribute to a better understanding of many things like the impact of different substrate ingredients, promising cultivars that deserve more recognition, development of new and interesting cultivars, insights on the best preservation methods, storage methods, drying temps, and more).  MagicMyco is also doing some fascinating work with creating hybrid cultivars (you may have heard about people using snake venom to do this, which always seemed a bit "crazy" to me, well MagicMyco is doing the same thing using antibiotics instead).  I am fascinated by all of this and hope to visit the MagicMyco lab VERY SOON and I'll be sure to take as much video as he will allow while I'm there.  Ideally we will even collaborate on some future projects, and I will get to walk you through some real time HPLC testing to answer some important questions all on the same day I visit the lab!

Results of the first Cultivar Cup (which they are calling the "preliminary cup" will be published on Sunday July 31st, and the best part is that I submitted a sample of Estero to this Cup which means we will have some really important data soon that the world has never seen before.  Its like Christmas in July! Here is the MagicMyco Instagram link.

4) I finally created a proper GordoTEK LOGO and also did a limited edition run of beautiful stickers from this!

If any patron would like one, private message me your mailing address and I'll send it free of charge while supplies last.  The design actually has a lot of personal meaning to me:  On my first DMT experience (DMT molecule of course forms the first 'O' in GordoTEK) I saw an incredible, 3D high definition large cross that was slowly rotating about its vertical axis (hence the cross that forms the "T" in the design), in this experience, the cross was made up of hundreds of cubes, each cube housed a family of people. It was truly an amazing sight, took my breath away. I also saw the DNA double helix on that same trip, and swam underwater with neon tropical fish (hence the bubbles). I saw many other beautiful sights on that same night including bioluminescent plants and fungi (same color as the double helix in the logo), hundreds of animals (sloth, jaguar, raccoon, scorpion, snake, fish) I even traveled through space and time and saw an alien civilization. But the most meaningful thing about that night: I had a vision of a very special person from my past, a child who was very sick who I helped in real life, she stayed with my wife and I during her surgery and recovery, we were blown away by how much love and joy this little one had in her:

One day maybe I'll share the full details of the trip, but I'll just say the part where this child appeared to me brought me to tears and the new logo will remind me of that and the lesson I learned from the experience: Our acts of love and compassion toward even one helpless person, have a ripple effect that can spread out touching countless lives in ways we could never anticipate, positively impacting the world.

5) I am planning to do Panaeolus bisporus research, I don't want to get into the details here, but I'll just say that I've come across some very interesting anecdotes about this species and had the good fortune of crossing paths with a European enthusiast and dedicated collector who has already graciously sent me materials to examine under the microscope!  I'm very excited about this project.

6) I went on a spur of the moment tour of Midwest Grow Kits in Illinois, and got some nice "behind the scenes" footage of their operations.  I will put together a short video of that soon too.  I thought it was really cool, and I was surprised by how big their operation was.  The mycology hobby has really blown up during the last couple of years as more and more people are discovering the medicinal and culinary benefits of mushrooms.  These guys have the biggest pressure cooker I've ever seen, capable of sterilizing 600 mycobags at once at up to 20 psi! They also had more All American sterilizers than I've ever seen, and the biggest laminar flow hood workbench area I've ever seen, haha.

7) Combining 3 and 5 above, I have thoughts of attempting a pan cyan pan bisporus fusion, this may be a fun research experiment and is the kind of wacky cutting edge stuff I like to do, things that no one else has attempted before (that I know of).  You might be thinking, "but these are two different species, impossible to hybridize".  You may be right, but can you really know before trying?  Most people don't realize that a dog, wolf, coyote, and fox are 4 different species that can interbreed and produce viable offspring.  Perhaps two mushroom species that look similar from the same genus (Panaeolus) can in fact hybridize.  Lets find out!  The prospect of creating something totally new is pretty exciting.  And if that doesn't work out, maybe I'll just try crossing some different pan cyans with Estero to see what happens...

8) I still intend to do a series on Cacti.  I've been growing San Pedros from seed and cuttings for 2 years now and they are really making a lot of progress (well the cuttings are anyway, the seedlings are still tiny). I highly recommend you start growing some of these for fun as they can take quite a while to get big, and they make beautiful, low maintenance house plants!  🪴 😉

9) Sort of related to cacti above, our dear friend Frederick Van Der Sypt has DONE IT AGAIN publishing: Validation and exploratory application of a simple, rapid and economical procedure (MESQ) for the quantification of mescaline in fresh cactus tissue and aqueous cactus extracts  This is another brilliant paper that deserves more attention and I plan to give it that attention eventually.  It has wider reaching implications than can be seen at first glance.  I will elaborate more on this later.

10) I've been experimenting with using coir instead of straw in the pan cyan TEK.  It APPEARS to work about the same, at least with the Estero cultivar, and the contamination rates are FAR lower.  This might be an important development and I have already edited the TEK to mention it and I give specific amounts to use in the recipe.  That said, I have been holding back on posting about this until I did some comparison potency testing.  This is one of the things I wanted to do on my upcoming visit to the MagicMyco lab, so more analysis and information soon to come!

In short, there is LOTS TO LOOK FORWARD TO!

Love you all, and thanks so much for your support, love, and encouragement!

______________________________________

Links to all of my TEKs, Videos, Trip music, and frequently asked questions with answers can be found here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/22774475 (everything is made available for FREE, I do not use pay walls, support the work only if you feel like you've benefited from it and you are able to do so).