Any updates on the mushroom experiments?

We've been doing a ton of stuff in the background. I am not sure if you caught our New Years update email, but we have a ton of new equipment being installed right now. Our new Buchi SFC-50 system will be here soon. That's a supercritical CO2 prep system with mass spec detector. This will allow us to separate, identify, and concentrate novel compounds in the mushrooms much faster than our existing Buchi prep HPLC system. This is for two main reasons. One, the supercritical CO2 will allow us to separate compounds from each other than are difficult using liquid mobile phases and normal HPLC columns. This is especially true for things with fatty acid sidechains, like many of the hericenones and hericenes in lion's mane. Those are very difficult to separate from each other to make standards. The other big advantage is the mass spec detector. Our existing prep HPLC system only has a UV detector like normal HPLC systems. This means we can only "see" things with chromophores. Well many of the active compounds in lion's mane don't have a chromophore, so it is difficult for us to find them and concentrate them. Right now we have to guess, then take fractions over to our UPLC-MS systems to get mass data. With the new SFC-50 system we will be able to see the UV spectrum and mass data right in the Buchi, and then separate compounds by mass.

This is our existing C-850 system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4LhwgbK3IQ

This is how we were able to be the first ones to create an erinacine-A reference standard years before anyone else. Even now, all the commercially available reference standards have been made from our Erinamax. Chromadex bought a bunch of our bottles to have enough raw material to isolate for standards, and now a couple of other sources have done the same thing. We have even been partnering with Chromadex and sharing standards with each other now. This machine has also allowed us to make standards of multiple hericenes and hericenones.

Here is the new SFC-50 system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWw7cc1QDjg

This will rapidly speed up our reference standard creation process, not only for mushrooms, but for a bunch of plants we are working on as well. We are in the process of developing secondary metabolite assay methods for lion's mane fruiting body, which we will be publishing in the AOAC journal. We also have been speaking to the leaders at AOAC, and they have invited us to join their Botanical Ingredient and Dietary Supplement Integrity (BIDSI) functional mushroom advisory panel. We are going to join it, so we will be part of deciding AOAC's priority for testing methods on mushrooms, and convening working groups for the various methods. My goal is to push for secondary metabolite assay methods for lion's mane fruiting body and mycelium, along with expanded Cordyceps metabolite assays. So we will be working very closely with AOAC on methods. Our science director Ellie is also joining their statistics working group. We also may know who the next head of USP is, and will be more closely working with USP to expand methods. The next couple years are going to be really cool for pushing the science of supplements forward!