Picture a warm Australian summer afternoon: windows down, sweet fragrance on the breeze, roads lined with yellow flowering trees. You probably know them as wattle. But most people don’t realise that ‘wattle’ isn’t one plant at all, but a sprawling genus of more than 1,000 species. Fewer still would know that some species contain DMT, a psychedelic compound better known from Amazonian plant brews than the Australian bush.
Our group at NICM Health Research Institute has gone even further down the rabbit hole, investigating wattle species as a source of new psychedelic compounds not yet described in the scientific literature.
