Andrew Gallimore

This is called decarboxylation.

You remove a carbon dioxide molecule and you've got tryptamine.

Now here you can go in a number of different directions.

You can go to serotonin, which is 5-hydroxytryptamine.

or you can go to DMT, to simply add two methyl groups, two carbon atoms.

And so what is adding these things?

So there's an enzyme called indolethylamine N-methyltransferase, or INMT for short.

This is the key enzyme for DMT production.

It adds these two groups, these methyl groups, to tryptamine, which is produced from tryptophan, to produce DMT.

So tryptophan is one of the essential amino acids, so it is something you consume.

Some people do.

I don't think it would have an appreciable effect, but people take tryptophan for lots of reasons.

So this process...

First of all, it's just there's orders of magnitude.

I mean, a gland that is designed to produce nanograms or micrograms of something, to ask it to produce a thousand times more of an entirely different molecule is quite an ask.

However, that's not the only reason.

There's actually been a study recently in the last, I think, three or four years that looked at DMT levels in rat brains in real time.

They're not in humans, but in rat brains.

They actually have a technique now called microdialysis where they can basically measure in an awake, moving, normally behaving rat, they can measure the levels of DMT in its brain.

and what they found was that