But from what I understood the plant makes alkaloids as a form of antioxidant and it produces them to counter the oxidation from ROS.
That is a possibility.
I definitely believe it possible that tyramine series protoalkaloids including mescaline serve potential roles as part of an oxygen detoxification system.
However I believe this may be overly simplistic.
Mescaline is, for example, a mitotic spindle inhibitor and because it is essentially a novel amino acid, it can interfere with cellular processing for organisms that lack the ability to process tyramines or at least prevent them from reaching vital components and organs via barriers, like the human brain barrier.
Tyramine can serve as ROS oxygen storage systems and protective molecules as well as energy and molecular storage system molecules.
None of these roles are mutually exclusive.
Mescaline itself can even, today, serve as a chemical attractant ensuring propagation by a partner species. It's a type of symbiosis. I'm talking about people, of course.
But I don't think the alkaloids supply depletion is the reason for the eventual death but rather the plant has reached its genetic limitation and can no longer combat the damage at a fast enough rate or simply don't have enough reserves to form anymore.
That could be the case.
I think that they eventually starve to death.
I could be wrong and you could be right or we could both be right, I think, but it's difficult to do cellular autopsies or post mortem examinations and find a cause of death.
I do have, for all intents and purposes, specimens of alkaloid free San Pedro cacti, bred and selected carefully. They seem, as cuttings, to not live nearly so long as those that have alkaloids.
So the alkaloids may offer some advantage that facilitates longer endurance of adverse situations.
The alkaloids are simply the side products of the enzymes and other reactions to attempt to reach equilibrium of the plant while not destroying anything or releasing excess
That is entirely possible.
But they appear to be stored, transported, metabolized and have enzymatic diversity, all while conforming to a fairly narrow range of tyramines, which are known to have multiple biological properties and impacts upon cellular and viral metabolism.
They also co-occur with large masses that contain considerable nutrients and water.
In San Pedro type cacti the alkaloids appear to help the plants endure cold season conditions that could cause rot.
In Peyote and it's close relatives like Turbinicarpus the plants can spend considerable time below ground or even under water in some cases and again, and we also find tyramine alkaloids.
I find it tenable, that the alkaloids serve roles as cellular protectants as well as storage molecules that allow sugar-like components to be sequestered into forms that potentially confer advantages in specific environments. I think that the idea that they are enzymatic side products is tenable for their original debue in nature, but I believe that was an aquatic environment as well, and that it was also more than half a billion years ago when tyramines likely first emerged.
They appear to be a synapomorphy shared by plants and marine algae that descended from the single celled ancestors of plants and that algae. That is a trait shared by the descendents of a common ancestor, a synapomorphy.
However, as mentioned, tyramines also occur in mammals and other animals, as well as the close animal relatives, the filament bodied fungi. This indicates that these protoalkaloids are a synapomorphy for all of these phyla meaning that the tyramines appear to have existed in the shared ancestors of all of these lineages. That's primordial, over five hundred million years ago.
Since then, I think the roles that tyramines have in nature is complex and varied to some degree, but that we find larger quantities of them in organisms that live in aquatic environments or in organisms that spend much of their year in cold and wet conditions and or withdrawn into the ground. Even the primordial environment where these molecules appear to have first emerged on Earth; is aquatic.
So, I believe that tyramines have long served roles as specific types of protectant molecules. Plants store them in vacuoles and transport them in vesicles between cells. Our brains also transport them in vesicles between cells as signal molecules. That also speaks to the nature and situation of their evolution and primordial biological roles. But, in single celled organisms, which didn't communicate by versicles with tyramines. The molecules are separated from the cytoplasm and cells can, theoretically store, metabolise and or excrete them. They seem to store and metabolise them, despite the tyramine salts being water soluble.
Single celled flagellated primordial organisms in an aquatic environment don't have the largest range of behaviors. For photosynthetic life, rising and sinking in response to light, mating and avoiding being ingested are the primary activities, for predatory life it is similar, but without photosynthesis and in terms of following food. There is also dormancy as a potential activity.
Photosynthetic life has need of storage of energy, all life does. If it can store it in a way that protects it, that is all the better. It seems that tyramines did this in the ancient aquatic environment that i suspect they originated in and it appears to me that in cacti and marine algae, even in the roots of barley, that the tyramine alkaloids still serve this type of role, more than five hundred billion years later.
But, certainly, I could be wrong.
asucculent.com
![[:]](/data/avatars/s/58/58936.jpg?1707488068){kind=avatar}
