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Why are Some Alkaloids So Ubiquitous and Others Found Only in 1 Plant

Why is DMT produced by dozens of unrelated species? It's easy to make so it could occur by chance easily. It has a benefit so it's likely to be retained.
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How does DMT benefit plants? I am not challenging this, I'm just curious.
 
It must have some benefit or evolution would have ruled those plants out due to excessive resources/energy spent making the alkaloiid. Sedms to put off ruminant species from grazing it (see 'sheep staggers' for an example)
 
Right, that's an explanation for it's existence in some grasses, but it's so widespread, it's probable that it completes a handful of jobs.

If I remember correctly there was conservation about it's ability to absorb certain light frequencies.
 
Does this discrepancy simply result from the fact that some alkaloids are much simpler in structure, and thus more likely to be found in a wide array of species, as compared to the alkaloids which are more complex and require more enzymes and subsequent steps to synthesize?
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That's been said repeatedly by me and others, and the answer is "obviously"
 
Occam's Razor has hijacked this discussion and everyone's drunk with it. If all biological products served a purpose and all processes followed the path of least resistance, we'd be one infinite glycine polypeptide singing kumbaya.
 
we'd be one infinite glycine polypeptide singing kumbaya.
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That doesn't flow from the first part of the sentence at all.

Occam's Razor has hijacked this discussion and everyone's drunk with it. If all biological products served a purpose and all processes followed the path of least resistance
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Have you ever had a class that dealt in depth with evolution, as in, beyond the highschool biology course?

We're not talking about short term blips where plants or animals may do things that are not beneficial. However, doing anything that is not beneficial somehow wastes energy- nothing can be produced without using energy. As a result, wasting energy will disadvantage the plant or animal, and over time this will exact a toll. Again, we're talking about anything from tens of thousands to tens of millions of years.

And the shortest route doesn't have to be taken. As long as something is beneficial enough that the benefits are outweighed by the costs, it's going to be retained. However, if a mutation comes along that results in less energy being used, that's the one that's going to be retained in the long term.

We raise our young much longer than just about any other species on the planet. This obviously has a huge cost, but the benefit is huge too. And it obviously works well for us.
 
I think the more amazing thing is that except from a few exceptions, the plants contain relative doses for the strength of the drugs they contain.... like a handfull of coffee bean is a good dose, a couple of hundred morning glory seeds is a good dose, a few poppy pods... sure the DMT is a bitch to extract in significatn quantities, but as for me the ONLY plant that seems to be ridculously overpowered and oversaturated for its own and (our own) good is datura, and namely Datura seeds. And they are a "complex" molecule too. unless someone else can think of another example..
 
Hammilton said:
Right, that's an explanation for it's existence in some grasses, but it's so widespread, it's probable that it completes a handful of jobs.

If I remember correctly there was conservation about it's ability to absorb certain light frequencies.
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And it's just a decarboxylation & methylation away from tryptophan (piss simple things for enzymes to do). In fact some plants contain N-methyl tryptophan (abrine) , but I can't remember which at the moment. Does't it seem curious that a lot of alkaloids are based on the heterocyclic & aromatic amino acids (eg proline, histidine, tryptophan, phenylalanine/tyrosine etc)? There's a reason for that that seems obvious to me! ;)
 
Hammilton said:
Have you ever had a class that dealt in depth with evolution, as in, beyond the highschool biology course?
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You do this a lot, I've noticed.

Hammilton said:
We're not talking about short term blips where plants or animals may do things that are not beneficial. However, doing anything that is not beneficial somehow wastes energy- nothing can be produced without using energy. As a result, wasting energy will disadvantage the plant or animal, and over time this will exact a toll. Again, we're talking about anything from tens of thousands to tens of millions of years.

And the shortest route doesn't have to be taken. As long as something is beneficial enough that the benefits are outweighed by the costs, it's going to be retained. However, if a mutation comes along that results in less energy being used, that's the one that's going to be retained in the long term.
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I don't disagree with the bulk of this. I was reacting to the theological slant this thread is taking.

Hindsight makes us see an elegant, serene, teleological principle that stands outside of time and herds everything towards functionality. But we're not standing at the end history, of some assembly line. Many of the genes we're transcribing are doomed not because of their disfunctionality, but because some big fucking spacerock'll hit the Amazon, or because some really gradual climactic tilt'll make the oceans anoxic, or whatever. Evolution is an open system, and there are vastly more traits selected by luck than by scarcity.

Yes morphine serves the papaver as pesticide and yes it's important to see DMT as goat roofie (or UV harnesser? interesting). But you have to take human bias out of the big picture. The persistence and incidence of these alkaloids--of any biological product--across any array of species is more precisely accounted for by molecular systematics. Where are the base pair sequences most similar? Where are there gaps? What are the likely reasons one gene remained in the genome of a number of disparate species while another was excised from all but a few?

As more genomes are sequenced and more detail is carved into the phylogenetic tree, I'll bet you this doctrine of metabolic streamlining will get old real fast.
 
Yeah, go to odd things

Cannabis is way overloaded with THC. Disregarding the 30% monsters out there, as I recall, even in some places before or without sophisticated breeding techniques 7-13% THC levels were not unheard of. That's an impressively high level for any plant.
 
seep said:
You do this a lot, I've noticed.



I don't disagree with the bulk of this. I was reacting to the theological slant this thread is taking.

Hindsight makes us see an elegant, serene, teleological principle that stands outside of time and herds everything towards functionality. But we're not standing at the end history, of some assembly line. Many of the genes we're transcribing are doomed not because of their disfunctionality, but because some big fucking spacerock'll hit the Amazon, or because some really gradual climactic tilt'll make the oceans anoxic, or whatever. Evolution is an open system, and there are vastly more traits selected by luck than by scarcity.

Yes morphine serves the papaver as pesticide and yes it's important to see DMT as goat roofie (or UV harnesser? interesting). But you have to take human bias out of the big picture. The persistence and incidence of these alkaloids--of any biological product--across any array of species is more precisely accounted for by molecular systematics. Where are the base pair sequences most similar? Where are there gaps? What are the likely reasons one gene remained in the genome of a number of disparate species while another was excised from all but a few?

As more genomes are sequenced and more detail is carved into the phylogenetic tree, I'll bet you this doctrine of metabolic streamlining will get old real fast.
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Good point.
Too much focus on natural selection in this thread.
Genetic drift is a major process in evolution which should be taken into account here and has been largely ignored so far.
 
I don't know that it's been ignored. I don't know that it offers any guidance on how this works out though.
 
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