from Hacker News

Deadly mushroom poison might now have an antidote – with help from CRISPR

by bcaulfield on 5/16/23, 6:23 PM with 11 comments

  • by freeqaz on 5/17/23, 1:33 AM

    The Death Cap mushrooms are invasive in the US, and they just recently found out why: They are able to reproduce asexually. I thought that was very interesting to learn! https://www.sciencealert.com/worlds-deadliest-mushroom-chang...
  • by Zickzack on 5/17/23, 3:54 PM

    Silibinin [1] is an antidote to death cap. As far as I know, silibinin has reduced the mortality from 2/3 to 1/3. If the damage done to the liver is already too big, then silibinin does not work and there are two options left: liver transplantation or death.

    I wonder why the article does not even mention it, and I am worried that it is a case of "not invented here". Silibinin is here for at least 30 years. I was shocked when I read the story of one who was poisoned by eating the destroying angel (same poison) unwittingly. That story basically said, that at the end of the aughts, his doctors in Great Britain did not know about silibinin.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silibinin

  • by cypherpunks01 on 5/17/23, 12:42 AM

    That's so cool!

    I feel like this is a solution that even someone who objects to CRISPR/gene-editing would approve of. Genetic editing of petri dish cells, helps discover previously unknown pathways, which lead to a search for pre-existing molecules that we'd already discovered a long time ago.

  • by pvaldes on 5/16/23, 9:59 PM

    Wow. Just wow. If true, this is fantastic.
  • by jeffrallen on 5/17/23, 6:37 AM

    I forage for mushrooms and I don't get why this is a problem we are even working on.

    The solution to people dying from mushrooms is to... not eat them. If people cannot understand that, and we manage to save them, what's to keep them from walking in front of a bus the next day. I mean you can only overcome ignorance only so many times before Darwin eventually wins the game.

    I don't want to blame the victim here, but it's not like the mushrooms stalk us and enter our mouths at night while we are sleeping.