Behind the Scenes at Nootropics Depot: Inside Our Pharmaceutical-Grade Testing Labs 🧪

Thats very interesting. I just did a quick google search and it does not seem to be very soluble in ethanol, it was about 0.5-1 mg/ ml in what im presuming to be 95% EtOH AND it seems to be very prone to oxidation. The patent, if i remember correctly, states that the raw material was macerated in EtOH and then the EtOH was replaced with water, which leads to the hydrophobic fraction to float on top. It does make sense that the ergosterol wouldnt come with the rest of the more lipophilic compounds if its not soluble in EtOH. It could also be that a lot of it degrades due to temperature, oxygen exposure and light. It also seems to degrade quite fast once the fungal cells die, so it could be that their way of preserving the fruiting body causes it to degrade more than yours.

Yeah, I would need to see their extraction flowchart to really know. I would also need to see a chromatogram of their raw lion's mane they used. I suppose it might be possible to create a high hericene/hericenone fruiting body without much ergosterol. You can certainly make a high ergosterol fruiting body that has no hericene and hericenones, so they are not directly correlated in that direction. However, all the samples I have seen with high hericenes/hericenones have had high ergosterol as well. So it might be the case of all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. You can make ergosterol without hericenes/hericenones, but you can't make hericenes/hericenones without ergosterol.

Your way of thinking definitely does make sense. Honestly it seems like Amyloban is a good example of why that is important. Its by no means bad and it does seem to work, and reliably so. But taking their process at face value, they use A LOT of raw material and they dont have particularly high bioactive %'s. They go through a kg of lions mane for about 20 grams of "active fraction".

When I first started putting a lot of resources into the natural side of things, I made the mistake of thinking it was all about extraction chemistry optimization. To be fair, it is that. However, that only matters once you have optimized the biosynthetic pathways to make high native amounts of the bioactives you want to extract. Once you optimize both, that's when the magic happens.

Also, quick side note. We had a conversation many months ago about what "amycenone" was, which Amyloban is standardised to. It also said at some point that it was standardised to 0.5% hericenones but that got removed. What i think it could be is that that the EtOH soluble and hydrophobic fraction is the "Amycenone", its not a class of compounds but rather a fraction. Hericenones are a part of that fraction and it could be the case that they used to be able to reliably get the pre-cut equivalent of 0.5% hericenones in that fraction but arent anymore so they removed that specification. Maybe its a similar situation to bacopa where certain methodologies would inflate the numbers or something. I do still wonder what the rest of the 94% of the finished product is, is it fillers and stabilisers? Is it fillers, stabilisers and part of the left over biomass? I know you talked about extractors reselling or selling back biomass after they have extracted it which eventually enters the supplement industry as bunk. Maybe thats what they do with the biomass? Who knows.

Yeah, that's exactly what I think is happening. They do not share their standardization methods or methodologies. Remember our conversation about the response factors? They might be making assumptions on response factors that are just not true in practice, so they are overstating the concentration of things because they didn't have primary reference standards. This is why places like PhytoLab are so crucial. Access to pure and validated reference standards are the only way for this industry to advance. We are good friends with Kiel who runs the US operations of PhytoLab, and they make the absolute best reference standards out there. He was the guy running Chromadex till recently, when the parent company rebranded as Tru Niagen and got out of the reference standard business. In fact, I have said it before, but all the commercially available reference standards on the market for erinacine A were made from our Erinamax. We were the first to release a material with high amounts of it, so everyone just scrambled to buy our retail product and isolate the standard from that. We worked with Chromadex in the background for that, and now with PhytoLab. So our work is actually helping to get these reference standards out as well.

I know I can be a bit forward and abrasive on here calling out bad actors in the space, which turns some people off to my tone and messaging. Also, our competitors do muddy the waters a lot of the time on us, but our work is truly pushing this industry forward in more ways than most consumers realize. We are on the AOAC Functional Fungi advisory board, where we are setting the standards for testing of these products. We have shared methods and reference standards with Nammex and Alkemist to help standardize testing. We collaborate with people like Oliver Catlin at BSCG to find new adulteration schemes, and with Jim Kababick at Flora Research labs. We have multiple projects going on right now with PurityIQ using their novel NMR techniques to catch new schemes (there is a big one right now in beta-glucans, by the way!) We have multiple projects with LeafWorks on DNA characterization. We have shared information and data with Twin Arbor to help improve their methods. We also just got reached out to yesterday by a competing brand that has their own lab to help them to interlaboratory validation on their methods. We are constantly collaborating in the background with people all over this industry to help push things forward, without thinking anything about how we will make money on it. Maybe I need to do a better job of showing everyone that, because I think the narrative a lot of the times is very different about us.