Only in Santa Cruz would a graduate student be encouraged to make a chemical that is found in a rare mushroom. Despite the hippie heritage of the university, it is not magic mushrooms that have attracted the attention of a young chemist and her mentor.

Laura Schuresko, a graduate student at the University of California at Santa Cruz, has been trying to make the elusive mushroom chemical phalloidin, an extremely useful tool for studying the inner workings of cells.

She and her mentor, Professor R. Scott Lokey described their successful quest to prepare a fluorescent variation of the mushroom chemical in a recent issue of Angewandte Chemie International Edition, a leading chemistry journal.

Biology researchers would love to have a steady supply of phalloidin. By adding a fluorescent label to the molecule, they can use it as a stain to observe the protein as it assembles into microfilaments inside of cells. The problem is, it is produced by the rare mushroom Amanita phalloides, which is very finicky about where it will grow – it essentially can't be grown domestically and harvested.

This highlights the importance of natural product chemists, scientists that resign themselves to the task of finding a way to synthetically make a natural chemical that is often in short supply.

Academic researchers are often drawn to the task of making rare natural chemicals because it is challenging and extremely important for the pharmaceutical industry. Molecules like phalloidin have features that are very hard to make. In this case, the tricky building block of the molecule was a thioether bridge, a sulfur atom that links two carbon atoms together. Other teams of researchers have made phalloidin

before, but because of difficulties like making that sulfur bridge, they could only produce extremely small amounts of the important chemical in a very wasteful process. By comparison, Schuresko and Lokey can make it boatloads.