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We had amazing participation for the first ever Island cup! Thank you so much to our participants and sponsors! None of this would be possible without our community support. The results are in, now time to present and make sense of it all.
In case you missed it, the Island cup 2023 potency analysis event was a call for mass data collection, where contestants submitted their fruits which they were most curious about. We did our best to minimize costs for participants, while partnering with some amazing sponsors to make it worth everyone's efforts. We held podcast discussions, sharing publicly our interests in this. For us, we wanted to focus less on top potency, and more on diversity for this event. For that reason, we made the decision to raffle off most of the prizes, rather than giving them to the top contestants. That being said, the top contestant will be the proud winner of a new flow hood from FLOCUBE (flocube.com).
We measured the extracted concentrations of several tryptamines in the submitted samples using HPLC for separation and DAD for compound detection and verification. The methods for this can be found in a pre-print publication co-authored by Tryp Labs (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.11.01.564784v1). I am really blown away with the results. It's likely that folks paying attention to these cup data drops would be able to almost tell you where things ranked, just based on species names, cultivar names, and sample photos. Some results help validate other's work, scoring relatively similar to previous analyses, and some of the results are completely new insights. Well enough jibber jabber, lets get to it. We present to you, The Island Cup results!
Figure 1. Island cup results, plotted as Psilocybin Equivalent [PSBEQ] in mg/g (y-axis) against samples ranked from highest to lowest PSBEQ (x-axis). Each dot represents a single entry.
Here is the excel sheet containing the data for the cup. Feel free to download it and make use of the numbers in your own investigations. I find the sort and filter features to be really useful, if you want to compare, say, just Psilocybe cubensis samples. I have made some columns detailing ratios of compounds, which may be useful in chemotyping strains or quality. For example, the psilocybin:psilocin ratio can inform ripeness or mishandling of samples, or psilocybin:baeocystin ratio can inform which fungi are within Psilocybe section Semilanceata.
Supplemental File 1. Official island cup results, xlsx format. In here one can find the tabulated results of the analysis.
The sheet is protected from editing. Of course, you can copy the data and paste it into your own excel files for your uses. My hopes are that everyone plays fair and doesn't manipulate the data to draw their own conclusions or boast their claims. May this link here serve as the authentic source of information. If you want to share the data with someone, send them here, so they can download themselves. I didn't make time to share all of the chromatography. My hopes is to share with you at least one sample chromatogram of each species tested by the end of the year. But I figured, it was better to give you the data thats ready now instead of waiting for everything. Think of this as the first course in the meal, there will be more coming.
Figure 2. Stacked bar chart of all entries in the cup ordered from highest to lowest psilocybin equivalent (PSBEQ).
Figure 3. Stacked bar chart of minor tryptamine alkaloids, organized from highest to lowest PSBEQ. As you can see, there is a lot to digest and make use of. Stay tuned for updates with the data! Mush Love!
The prize pool would not be possible without our sponsors. We are so thankful for their valuable contributions to our event and look forward to hosting more in the future with them! The data only exists with the participation of our community. We thank each and every one of you for your contribution. While growing mushrooms can be simple, the samples we received were top notch works of art. Great job everybody!