A team of Danish researchers has presented a novel method of producing the psychedelic chemical using common yeast.

"It's infeasible and way too expensive to extract psilocybin from magic mushrooms and the best chemical synthesis methods require expensive and difficult-to-source starting substrates," explains Nick Milne, an author on the new study published in the journal Metabolic Engineering. "Thus, there is a need to bring down the cost of production and to provide a more consistent supply chain."

If psilocybin research continues down the path it is currently on, there will be a great need for large-scale production in the coming years. It is not commercially viable to extract the chemical from magic mushrooms, but as Milne and his team suggest in their study, current synthesis methods are not ideal either.

"Recently the company COMPASS pathways developed and patented a new method for the chemical synthesis of psilocybin," the team writes in the study, "and while it improves on previous methods with an overall yield of 75%, it uses expensive 4-hydroxyindole as a starting substrate resulting in high production costs which may limit its application."

Last year a team of researchers from Miami University presented an incredibly novel way of producing psilocybin by engineering a well-known strain of Escherichia coli bacteria.