Denmark is in general pretty well known for doing stuff with yeast. The yeast used in most of the worlds lager beer are all "descendants" of a yeast cultivated by the beer company Carlsberg which have been distributed around the world. And the pharma company Nova were among the first to produce human insulin with yeast.

I mean it sounds like if you could get your hands on this yeast you could actually make psychedelic beer (or bread).

I think the method uses some special enzymes that can only be really be used with yeast. So yeast is just a supporting role in the operation and the enzyme is the star.

They say they tried to get E. Coli to operate the enzyme (E. Coli is used often to make all kinds of drugs, like insulin) but it didn't work and got yeast to work with it.

That's not quite the right read - the previous work (I'm not even sure if it was that lab) was to engineer e. coli to make psilocybin, but e. coli was a bad factory because it still needed a very expensive to make/obtain chemical added as a feedstock.

So instead, they put the same genetic material into yeast which already had the necessary metabolic equipment to make the entire compound "de novo" (i.e. from scratch - just add sugar and yeast nutrients and it pumps out psilocybin). The downside is that the yeast's metabolic pathways chew up about half the product, so there is still work to do on making it more efficiently, but at yields of 600mg/L it's not exactly a bad start. (For reference, depression researchers tested the compound at dose of 30 mg for a 155lb man and it yielded psychoactive effects.)

By my reading the yeast does the whole job, short of purification, meaning getting the yeast, sugar, and alcohol out of it afterward.

Why even a 50% loss of product would be debilitating is a mystery. It's not like the yeast collects a salary, or like sugar is expensive. The author doesn't seem to realize how little of the stuff is needed for a dose.

Your sibling comment said a yield of 600mg/L, and that a 30mg dose has psychoactive effects. Seems like that works out to 20 doses/L, which is a better yield than beer!

> But the first thing I thought when I saw the headline was, "Wow. That's some interesting beer."

You know those researchers have already thought that one through. They've each probably got a brew going in their basements as we speak...