Jul 13, 2026 · 1 hr 9 min · 12 segments
In this episode of the Brainforest Café, Dennis McKenna sits down with medicinal chemist Matt Metcalf to explore a genuinely strange frontier: testing drugs in pea seedlings and the touch-sensitive…
Matthew MetcalfGuest
Dennis McKennaHost
Some of the most interesting, um, peptides that you find in, um, in, um, in, uh, nature are from fungi, and they target opioid receptors.
... like biochemically, uh, as you know, they're much closer to animals than, than plants phylogenetically.
And I'd be surprised if people weren't, uh, working with, uh, with fungi possibly to develop these non-animal bioassays because, you know, I mean, they're, they're o- another obvious, you know, set of organisms that you could use for this, for this sort of, sort of work.
You know, the usual trope, a- as you've, as you know from taking my classes, you know, in a broader sense the question becomes why do plants make this vast vari- variety of what they call secondary products, you know? There's nothing secondary about them.
And, and, you know, they, they're secondary only in that they're not universally distributed.
And the usual trope is that basically these are messenger molecules, you know.
They are, they're repellents or they're toxins or they're attractants or they're, they function on the ecological level.
Uh, plants and fungi and everything that makes these things but plants and fungi expend, as you point out, a vast amount of metabolic energy to, to build these compounds, uh, that don't serve any obvious external function.
Some of the most interesting, um, peptides that you find in, um, in, um, in, uh, nature are from fungi, and they target opioid receptors.
... like biochemically, uh, as you know, they're much closer to animals than, than plants phylogenetically.
And I'd be surprised if people weren't, uh, working with, uh, with fungi possibly to develop these non-animal bioassays because, you know, I mean, they're, they're o- another obvious, you know, set of organisms that you could use for this, for this sort of, sort of work.
You know, the usual trope, a- as you've, as you know from taking my classes, you know, in a broader sense the question becomes why do plants make this vast vari- variety of what they call secondary products, you know? There's nothing secondary about them.
And, and, you know, they, they're secondary only in that they're not universally distributed.
And the usual trope is that basically these are messenger molecules, you know.
They are, they're repellents or they're toxins or they're attractants or they're, they function on the ecological level.
Uh, plants and fungi and everything that makes these things but plants and fungi expend, as you point out, a vast amount of metabolic energy to, to build these compounds, uh, that don't serve any obvious external function.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
