https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/e-coli-could-produce-a-popular-psychedelic-for-therapeutic-use/ > Studying psychedelics was taboo for decades, but in recent years drugs such as psilocybin—the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms”—have shown promise in clinical trials for treating conditions from depression to nicotine addiction. Growing the mushrooms can take months and is not practical for pharmaceutical production, however, and chemically synthesizing psilocybin is a costly and intensive process. Now scientists have successfully engineered Escherichia coli bacteria to produce the mind-bending drug. > The modified microbes generated up to 1.16 grams of psilocybin per liter of culture medium—the highest yield to date from any engineered organism and a 10-fold increase over the next best attempt. Scaled up, the new method could produce psilocybin for potential therapeutic use.