Deadly mushroom poison might now have an antidote – with help from CRISPR | Hacker News Reader

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

nature.com

29 pointsbcaulfield11 comments

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...

All mushrooms do that I thought.

Edit: according to the article, it's not all mushrooms, but there were a lot of known varieties that did. The new discovery is that death caps are one of them. It doesn't come across to me as a surprise, but maybe it was for some reason not expected.

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

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.

It reminds me of the iChip for antibiotic discovery. Maybe the two approaches can even be combined.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolation_chip

Wow. Just wow. If true, this is fantastic.

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.

They probably look pretty tasty to children.

I wish we could implement your solution when it comes to war. The way to make war less deadly and terrible is to not fight wars, these guns don't fire themselves. If only life was so simple.

You may say it is a bad argument as war depends on others, not just oneself, but in many instances of death cap mushroom poisoning, the victims are not the ones who picked and prepared the mushrooms, do they deserve death too?

It was used also for criminal purposes. Sometimes people is not offered the choice to not eat it. There is also a very similar species in a different genus (Amanitopsis, if I remember correctly) that are non toxic but are practically identical.

There are a lot of cases where the people eating them were not the ones that foraged, but were fed them at a meal at someone's house. Further, there are reports of immigrants accidentally eating poisonous mushrooms in the US, Europe and Australia because the poisonous ones bear a resemblance to otherwise safe mushrooms found in their home countries.

Finally, you have to a be a little cold to think someone deserves death because they ate something unknown to them to be poisonous.

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