N&PD Moderators: Skorpio
microbial amphetamines synthesis
Not sure if this has been discussed before, hope I'm not breaking synth discussion rules but I thought this was real interesting
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14677709
Would be cool if they could do this with essential oils somehow but its still pretty cool
Snowy
Bluelighter
It is cool, but has no practical value (no real synthesis), since the extraction and isolation is too hard. Even cooler would be if they identified and isolated the enzymes to do this. Then it would have some practical value. And the exact pathway would be interesting too.
fryingsquirrel
Bluelighter
We alreay have a fungus which prouces psilicybin, lets not get gready
...plus- so what if there are impurities. As long as the bacteria produce nothing toxic and yer able to seperate the acetophenones/sec-butylamine. the bacteria will mass produce themselves u can cookoff the microbes and ingest the compounds w/whatever(again as long as u can seperate the toxins)
As far as I can see the only thing the bacteria are doing is reductively aminating a phenyl-2-propane giving the amine, there is no suggestion they can aminate a phenylpropene, so forget essential oils. accessing interesting P2Ps would be the single biggest barrier to someone wanting to do this clandestinely. Nobody in the DEA is going to be losing sleep worrying about the biosynthesis of amphetamines anytime soon.
the reduction is enantioselective, so chiral AMP's can be made from an achiral P2P which is perhaps useful, though there are much better or easier ways of making pure enantiomers of amphetamines without bacteria and the very low volumetric efficiency bioconversion offers, yeast does the same thing. There are also lots and lots of other ways of reductively aminating P2P compounds.
separation of the product from the starting materials and by-products is trivial.
this is just an interesting novelty.
Biosynthesis and GM biosynthesis has its place, being able to produce ergolines for example using something easy to culture and without using claviceps species would have significant economic value
The biosynthesis of morphine is another, however this is more politically than economically driven, growing poppies is ubercheap, but the governments don't like it and would much prefer to pay academics vast amounts of money to develop the biotechnology to produce morphine in reactors under full government control.
nuke
Bluelighter
There are some ways to afford cathinones/ephedrines in high yield using certain enzymes though, if I recall correctly.
I don't think there's a huge drive for this, there are a couple labs working on it but it's not really getting that much attention or funding.
