Scientists Can't Find the Chemical That Makes This Mushroom Hallucinogenic

Researchers sequenced the genome of a prized Chinese bolete that causes visions of tiny people. They found zero known psychedelic compounds.

Scientists at the University of Utah sequenced the genome of Lanmaoa asiatica, a prized bolete mushroom from Yunnan province, and found no trace of the compounds that make other fungi hallucinogenic.

The mushroom causes what doctors call Lilliputian hallucinations: vivid visions of tiny, colorful figures marching and climbing over furniture. The effect sharpens with eyes closed.

More than a hundred people seek hospital treatment each year in Yunnan after eating undercooked L. asiatica. According to lead researcher Colin Domnauer, 96 percent of those patients reported seeing little people.

The team published its phylogeny in Mycologia, sequencing whole genomes from 53 specimens and building a family tree from 1,515 single-copy orthologous genes. Every major branch received full statistical support.

The sampling included 21 type specimens, the physical references that anchor a species name. The analysis reorganized the genus: six species renamed, four identified as new to science, two formally described as Lanmaoa fallax and Lanmaoa carbonilivor. The genus now holds 17 recognized species.

L. asiatica lacks the biosynthetic gene clusters that produce psilocybin in Psilocybe mushrooms and ibotenic acid in Amanita muscaria. Chemists have isolated and tested compounds from the fruiting body, profiled the blood of poisoned patients, and still found nothing that explains the visions.

The reports stretch beyond Yunnan. Communities in the northern Philippines describe similar effects. A third-century Chinese text refers to a mushroom that, eaten raw, lets one see "a little person."

Psilocybin and ibotenic acid have shaped nearly everything we know about psychoactive fungi: their pharmacology, their cultural histories, their clinical applications. A third biosynthetic route, evolved independently in a lineage of boletes more closely related to the common porcini than to any known hallucinogenic species, would widen that picture considerably.

The active agent in L. asiatica remains unidentified. Whatever it produces, it does so via a pathway no one has documented before.