Scientists Built a Psychedelic Superplant That Includes Shrooms, Ayahuasca, and Toad Venom Compounds : Milky Way News

EARTH, Laniakea Supercluster—Nature scatters its psychedelics across kingdoms, tucked inside mushroom caps, brewed from jungle vines, secreted from the glands of a desert toad. Now a team of scientists has consolidated the whole trippy catalog into one plant, and it's a tobacco relative that already grows like a weed.

The study by researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel was published April 2026 in the journal Science Advances, and could represent a first-of-its-kind proof of concept that may change how psychedelic medicine gets made.

The five compounds produced by the modified Nicotiana benthamiana (a species of tobacco commonly used in lab research) are DMT (the primary psychoactive ingredient in the Amazonian brew ayahuasca), psilocybin and psilocin (the active agents in magic mushrooms), and bufotenin and 5-MeO-DMT (potent hallucinogens secreted from the Sonoran Desert toad.)

The researchers introduced a suite of genes sourced from mushrooms, plants, and toads into the tobacco plant through a process called agroinfiltration, in which bacteria deliver foreign genetic material into plant leaves.

"Compared to other pathways where you have very complex chemistries, this is kind of a simple chemistry,” researcher Paula Berman told Science. “We know what types of reactions to expect. So it wasn’t a surprise.”

Complete biosynthesis of psychedelic tryptamines from three kingdoms in plants. (Credit: Science Advances)

The key insight was that tobacco plants already produce abundant tryptophan, the amino acid that serves as the biochemical starting material for all five psychedelic compounds.

One of the study’s more striking technical achievements involved AI. The team used Google DeepMind's AlphaFold3, a tool that predicts three-dimensional protein structures, to identify why a critical enzyme was underperforming. After fixing the issue with a single targeted mutation, the amount of 5-MeO-DMT produced in the plants jumped roughly 40-fold.

The implications extend well beyond the lab bench.

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Wild populations of psychedelic-producing organisms are under increasing pressure from habitat loss and overexploitation. The Colorado River toad, a natural source of 5-MeO-DMT, has become a particular poster child for this problem, with enthusiasts seeking the animal out for its psychoactive secretions. Meanwhile, clinical trials of psilocybin-assisted therapy for depression, PTSD, and addiction continue to expand worldwide, driving demand for pharmaceutical-grade compounds.

Crucially, the genetic modification is intentionally non-heritable—the introduced DNA doesn't integrate into the plant’s genome, meaning the effect is temporary and can't be passed to future generations.

For now, the psychedelic tobacco plant remains a lab curiosity. But in a field moving as fast as psychedelic medicine, lab curiosities have a way of becoming clinical realities faster than anyone expects.

Maybe it’s time to clear out a portion of the backyard garden, just in case the new seeds become available.

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Unlike so-called “magic mushrooms,” the research shows that this little-known fungi does not contain any known psychedelic compounds that produce the classic effects associated with psilocybin ingestion.