Evolving Psychedelics - Cementing Synapses - Antidepressant Side Effects - Brain Tumors

[Breedlove, S]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/18/science/how-psychedelic-mushrooms-evolved-their-magic.html

How Psychedelic Mushrooms Evolved Their Magic

By Rachel Nuwer

No one knows why magic mushrooms evolved to produce psilocybin, a powerful psychedelic molecule. But this trait was apparently so beneficial for fungi that it independently evolved in two distantly related types of mushrooms.

An even greater surprise to biologists was that rather than arriving at the same solution for producing psilocybin, the two groups pursued completely different biochemical pathways, according to a study published last month in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

“This finding reminds us that nature finds more than one way to make important molecules,” said Dirk Hoffmeister, a pharmaceutical microbiologist at Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany and an author of the study. He added that it was also evidence that mushrooms were “brilliant chemists.”

Practically speaking, Dr. Hoffmeister said, the research also suggested a possible new path for synthesizing psilocybin for use in scientific research and therapies. “We can expand our toolbox,” he said.

Psilocybe and Inocybe mushrooms occur in some of the same habitats, but they follow different lifestyles. Psilocybe, the group that includes what are traditionally called magic mushrooms, thrives on decaying material such as decomposing organic matter or cow dung. Inocybe, commonly known as fiber caps, are symbiotic organisms that form intimate, mutually beneficial relationships with trees.

In 1958, Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD, became the first researcher to isolate psilocybin from Psilocybe mushrooms. Some scientists later suspected that a few Inocybe mushrooms also produced the compound. Since then, psilocybin has been identified in around half a dozen Inocybe species. (The other species tend to produce a potent neurotoxin.)
    © 2025 The New York Times Company


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https://www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/protein-tug-of-war-controls-pace-of-synaptic-development-sets-human-brains-apart/

 Protein tug-of-war controls pace of synaptic development, sets human brains apart

By Holly Barker

At first glance, the mice in Pierre Vanderhaeghen’s lab in Leuven, Belgium, seem unremarkable. But inside their tiny heads, their cerebral cortex contains a mix of mouse and human neurons at two stages of development: Their native synapses are fully mature, but the connections formed from human cells are delayed and comparable to those of a newborn human baby.

Vanderhaeghen and his colleagues are studying the chimeric mice to explore this drawn-out process of synaptic development, a feature that distinguishes human brains from those of other mammals.

Many aspects of human brain development proceed slowly—neurogenesis, myelination, gliogenesis—but synaptic maturation is particularly protracted. In the prefrontal cortex, for instance, some synapses don’t fully develop until a person reaches their mid-20s.

Deviations from this maturation rate could mean that “milestones won’t be reached at the same time” and might underlie some forms of autism or intellectual disability, says Vanderhaeghen, professor of neurosciences and group leader at the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Brain and Disease Research.

An evolutionarily conserved protein called SRGAP2 controls this timing in most mammals. Humans, however, have partially duplicated copies—SRGAP2B and SRGAP2C—that inhibit the ancestral protein, two teams reported in 2012.

Like other duplicated genes found only in humans, SRGAP2 resides in a repetitive—and therefore unstable—part of the genome, says Evan Eichler, professor of genome sciences at the University of Washington, and an investigator on one of the 2012 studies. “These regions create liability by predisposing us to genomic rearrangement, [but] to persist in the population, they must have an advantage. It’s part of the cost of what it is to be human.”

© 2025 Simons Foundation
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https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/10/23/nx-s1-5582787/antidepressant-side-effects-mental-health

 Antidepressant side effects differ greatly depending on the drug

Will Stone

Doctors have long known that antidepressants come with side effects for cardiovascular and metabolic health.

But a major analysis from a team of researchers in the U.K. has, for the first time, pulled together data from more than 150 clinical trials to compare the physical side effects of dozens of antidepressants.

The study, published in the Lancet this week, details how each medication can affect weight, blood pressure, heart rate, cholesterol and other areas of health.

The end result is something akin to a "sports league table" for 30 different antidepressants based on their side effect profile, says lead author Dr. Toby Pillinger, a psychiatrist at King's College London.

"It's never been done at this scale before and no one's ever put specific numbers to the amount of weight you'll put on, or to the amount that your cholesterol goes up," he says.

The findings are based on existing data, mostly from 8-week drug studies, that altogether represent more than 58,000 patients.

The most frequently prescribed antidepressants in the U.S. — selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, like Zoloft and Prozac — tended to have fewer physical side effects, according to the analysis.

Other medications, particularly some of the older drugs, were shown to have more significant impacts.

    © 2025 npr


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https://www.sciencenews.org/article/brain-cancer-glioblastoma-erode-skull

 Brain cancer can dissolve parts of the skull

By Meghan Rosen

It sounds like something from a horror movie: A disease that eats through bone, dissolving the fused plates of the skull like bubbling acid.

But a type of brain cancer called glioblastoma actually does something similar, triggering the erosion of living skull tissue, researchers report October 3 in Nature Neuroscience. The work shows in gory detail that brain cancer can erode bone, a harmful effect that wasn’t previously known, says Jinan Behnan, a brain tumor immunologist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, New York.

Behnan’s findings uncover a creepy new facet of glioblastoma, an enigmatic cancer still cloaked in scientific questions. “We really still don’t understand exactly what this disease is,” she says.

Glioblastoma is an aggressive form of brain cancer that’s particularly lethal and nearly impossible to cure. In the United States, doctors diagnose more than 12,000 new cases every year. Five years after diagnosis, only about five percent of patients over 40 years old survive.

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