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zed
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You know something about Lysergic acid producing yeast? Stop holding out!
Tell us about it! Give us a link.
[Edited on 10-4-2021 by zed]
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IrishJeremy
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Quote: Originally posted by superamoeba  | | Quote: Originally posted by unionised | Opium poppies are perfectly legal in the UK and I don't know of any ban in the US. Is there one?
Also, they grow just fine here. My Grandmother used to grow them.
[Edited on 26-5-15 by unionised] |
In the US, the only part of the P. somniferum plant that is LEGAL to possess are the seeds because they contain zero active alkaloids. It is illegal
to grow the plants at all, however, I do see people who get away with doing it in their front yards every year. So, either it is mildly tolerated or
most police don't really know what they look like.
[Edited on 5-4-2021 by superamoeba] |
Papaver Somniferum are not illegal to grow in the US, there are companies that sell the dried pods for "ornamental" reasons such as flower arranging,
but it's pretty obvious what they are really being bought for. What's illegal is growing them with the intent to extract the active drugs, and
actually extracting them. You can grow them in your garden if you want.
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Fyndium
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| Quote: Originally posted by karlos³ | | The bad people who would be interested in this must be very stupid bad people because the cost of growing and smuggling raw opium is magnitudes lower
than the price of making it with GMO yeast. |
Don't you see a pattern here? Some dope costs 1000$/kg in Asia, and it commands a million in the other parts of the world, yet one would need to
travel through a lot, and know contacts and fear of getting robbed or incarcerated for life, as Asians tend to treat narco guys pretty unfriendly.
Smuggling needs organizations, and organizations eat profits for living.
| Quote: Originally posted by Texium (zts16) | | It's impossible to convert plain sugar into morphine... considering morphine contains nitrogen and sugar does not. The yeast necessarily requires a
nitrogen containing feedstock that it is able to process as well. Ideally, this could be something as simple as an ammonium salt, but it may not be
that easy. Yeast requires additional nutrients to thrive as well. Even using unmodified yeast to produce alcohol from sugar water is not sustainable
without extra nutrients. For someone making moonshine with cheap commercial yeast, this isn't generally a concern, because you can just buy fresh
yeast for each batch (and quite often, commercial yeast includes some key nutrients anyway). On the other hand, buying more expensive GMO yeast for
every batch is certainly not profitable. |
Yeast is grown in aerobic environment, and alcohol in anaerobic. One turns booze batch into yeast batch by aerating it. Yeast is grown by the ton this
way industrially. I've done both, and yes, I know about nutrients, and have taken that also in consideration. Nutrients are sold in bags in every
brewing store anyway, if one doesn't bother using ordinary supply. Yeast can even cannibalize itself if necessary.
| Quote: Originally posted by draculic acid69 | | I remember when news about this first broke and I see that this thread is missing a vital part of the story: As soon as the scientists who did this
succeeded they let law enforcement and government in on the creation for the purpose of making laws against using selling or possessing this yeast so
that instead of the usual game of catch-up of the law trying to get precursors outlawed for years was avoided thus ensuring that there creation was
never used outside of predetermined purposes. It was the first time this sequence of events has ever occurred. |
If it's really kept in some highly developed country in specific research purposes only, it might stay off for a while, but likely Chinese will
eventually develop one because they can either profit from it by using it themselves or selling it to others, and once it's out, it ain't getting back
in. Something worth money with known directions tend to be dug upon, and only good way to keep something off the radar is to keep it's whole existence
as a secret. NSA has this scheme: they file secret patents, and if someone files a similar enough, they will come public with it and reserve a 10-year
proprietary patent for it at once.
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Texium
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| Quote: Originally posted by Fyndium | | Quote: Originally posted by Texium (zts16) | | It's impossible to convert plain sugar into morphine... considering morphine contains nitrogen and sugar does not. The yeast necessarily requires a
nitrogen containing feedstock that it is able to process as well. Ideally, this could be something as simple as an ammonium salt, but it may not be
that easy. Yeast requires additional nutrients to thrive as well. Even using unmodified yeast to produce alcohol from sugar water is not sustainable
without extra nutrients. For someone making moonshine with cheap commercial yeast, this isn't generally a concern, because you can just buy fresh
yeast for each batch (and quite often, commercial yeast includes some key nutrients anyway). On the other hand, buying more expensive GMO yeast for
every batch is certainly not profitable. |
Yeast is grown in aerobic environment, and alcohol in anaerobic. One turns booze batch into yeast batch by aerating it. Yeast is grown by the ton this
way industrially. I've done both, and yes, I know about nutrients, and have taken that also in consideration. Nutrients are sold in bags in every
brewing store anyway, if one doesn't bother using ordinary supply. Yeast can even cannibalize itself if necessary. |
Yes, I’m well aware of how growing yeast works. I grew up around breweries. My point was that your initial assertion of
“converting 2kg of sugar into 1g of morphine” is oversimplified and unrealistic. You still need a nitrogen-containing feedstock, and unless they
can incorporate an ammonium salt or urea, that’s certainly going to be more expensive than the sugar. Still profitable? Sure, if everything else is
done right. But not quite as extreme.
Regardless of whether this becomes available to “bad people,” it’ll only be the more sophisticated ones who are able to use it successfully.
Reproducing a strain of yeast for many generations while retaining the same traits is not trivial. You have to keep it sealed off from contamination
by any wild yeasts (which are everywhere), and aerate it with sterile air, or else you’ll end up finding that your special yeast isn’t so special
anymore.
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karlos³
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| Quote: Originally posted by Texium (zts16) |
Regardless of whether this becomes available to “bad people,” it’ll only be the more sophisticated ones who are able to use it successfully.
Reproducing a strain of yeast for many generations while retaining the same traits is not trivial. |
Yeah I'll hope to obtain such a strain at some point in the future 
I figure it will be easier than obtaining a good ergot strain, and that was definitely not complicated.
But I'm even more after the THC yeast 
The lysergic acid yeast, meh...
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Fyndium
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Shouldn't one just anyway keep a separate cultivation setup for the desired yeast and only pick more when needed with clean/sterile equipment? Yeast
can also be dried, frozen, etc.
I'm not sure how yeasts are developed. Are they just cultivating countless batches with desired conditions and keep looking if any strains adapt
forward desired behavior, and once any improvement is noticed, breeding that strain further so that only the best survive in the more and more harsh
environment, until a limit comes up? Like oil and plastic eating yeasts, and so on.
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draculic acid69
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Anyone who got there hands on it would obviously know how to treat it and keep it going. No one is Gunna get there hands on this op8 producing yeast
and then go "so I
just Chuck it in a beer fermenter right" . Anyone who got there hands on it is going to know what there doing and will understand the required sterile
rooms, equipment and practices needed. This isn't something a janitor could steal and then sell down at the pub.
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Fyndium
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I've seen various instances when people have gotten their hands on something they have no clue how to handle.
I've been told that I'm a professional and I know what I'm doing just because I have a business registered. Well, not quite. I just know how to
register a business.
The difference is, if someone could get something, but could they turn it into something useful. Quite a lot of stuff is useless for most of the
people because they have no skillset for utilizing them. A simple chemical synthesis is something that more than 50% would fail even with decent
instructions.
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symboom
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https://www.reddit.com/r/DrugNerds/comments/my6q19/complete_...
Without genetic engineering, Biosynthesis only tends to be helpful if you can take advantage of the activity of an enzyme that is already present.
Take for example the activity of producing l-PAC from benzaldehyde in yeast. Some others hypothesize that safrole can be produced from Vanillin if fed
to some certian species of soil bacteria.
You would need equipment to make a stable cell line expressing the necessary genes and subsequent culture of the yeast. Then you'd need equipment for
the scale-up from initial cell line creation to a volume big enough to produce an appreciable amount (so a large bioreactor, or lots of incubators
with space for flasks). Then you would need a purification process to extract the morphine from the yeast media and remove everything else. I'm not
going to cover that here but it's a whole separate endeavor from MAKING the morphine.
To get past even the first step, you would need:
Space to culture the yeast. An incubator, specifically a 37 DegC one that keeps a certain % of CO2 in the incubator air.Here's an article on how to
DIY one for $350. Here's a manufactured one for $1500 on ebay.
A hood to perform sterile work in, so your yeast culture does not become contaminated. Here's one for $1500 on ebay and here's a new HEPA filter for
it. You'd need some bleach to decontaminate it when you started, and ethanol to clean it before every use.
General lab equipment (pipettes, centrifuge...) Here's some pipettes. This centrifuge might work. You'd also need some consumables.
Big one: Cell culture media. The yeast needs to grow in a specific solution. You dissolve this stuff in water but then need to sterilize it... which
leads to next item.
Autoclave. You need to be able sterilize the flasks you culture with, as well as anything that will directly touch the yeast culture (glass pipettes
when replacing culture media, among other things.)Here's a cheap one.
So to total up this shitty list... 1500 + 1500 + 900 + 500 + 160 + 100 = about $5000. Then add in all the money you'd spend on tubes, media, and
culture flasks and all the other things I didn't mention.
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Fyndium
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Equipping a decent small lab easily costs $5k. And the guys that would do that morphine thing, will invest 10 times that to get all the stuff, because
the expected ROI is so high. Industry gets that 100-fold, because they can provide steady income for years to come. Not to mention that there is
evidence that state actors like NK are doing that stuff, so the cost is definitely not an issue, although they might not actually pay to their
workers, but instead make to choose between medal of the hero of labor and an isotope of lead.
So, while it's not in the reach of shake-and-bakes, it's definitely not a cost issue for the ones who might be interested. People come from various
conditions, and I know people who can merely afford food, the ones ordering $30 GPU:s from Ali, and then I've got friends who tune cars and they don't
hesitate another second to throw $30k into some project. I place myself on the middle, I suppose, as using few thousand per year into a hobby that I
like very much is a good investment in my view.
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