Goddamn, I fucking HATE pigs. There are only a very few certain things I would call the filth for. Becoming aware of a paedophile, rapist, or child / animal abuser (although if I actually saw someone abusing animals I almost certainly wouldn't ring the pork, Its one of those things that both makes me sick to my stomach, and inclined to hospitalize the animal abusing sack of fermented hobo piss.)
I've had so much harrassment, abuses of legal process, even had my pets slaughtered wholesale during a raid by the bastards, allegedly looking for a weed grow. At the time I didn't even have a bag of weed, and I was not growing either. It was bullshit intended to get them a warrant from the magistrate, so they could come on a fishing expedition, and harrass me over the lab.
I got arrested once and convicted, for the explosives thing, but ever since, after that, there have been multiple raids, on some really fucking spurious grounds (like for instance, a warrant based on a 'crime' which in actual fact does not even EXIST)
I wish I knew how to get a lawyer that I could use to sue the bastards.
They've broken valuable ultramicroscale glassware amongst other equipment, opened a jar of liquid they recovered from the lab one time, whilst I was detained in the lounge/living room, fucking moron opened it whilst standing around in the same room.
Dumb bloody shithead. Thankfully it was only an extraction of a plant into naptha. But Christ alive, you don't just pick up a random jar of liquid in an unfamiliar lab, and start fiddling around with it, opening the top.
What would have happened had that been something extremely toxic, corrosive, or just plain pyrophoric, leaving it to burst into flame up in the copper's face (not worried about that happening mind you, I'd be bent double laughing my arse of at the pure hilarity of a pig taking on a new job as a
human torch:D )
More concerned about what could have happened if said pig dropped the jar, leaving its contents to spew out over the floor.
The worst shit the fucking bastards have done are killing my pet spiders, and breaking the integrated distillation sidearm in a microscale pear-shaped flask I have (got it off ebay, for about a fiver, which was a really really lucky find. A pearshaped borosilicate glass flask, with distillation sidearm and a condenser built into the top for reflux etc.)
But I doubt I'll be finding one of these on ebay for that sort of price again. I'm damn glad that the 10ml ground glass jointed flat bottomed round flasks were not with the rest of my lab-ware. and as it happened they were in the fridge because there was something inside that needs to be kept cool to preserve them. In this case the sclerotia of the parasitic fungus Claviceps purpurea, more trivially known as ergot. I found some ergot sclerotia (the fruiting body) in a wild ryegrass. I've spent the last three years or so just study it, downloading and reading literally hundreds of papers, getting yet more papers thusly from the citations at the end that are titled like they would prove useless. Along with the most excellent book on ergot, The Genus Claviceps, a very comprehensive bppl. I'd love a hard copy but it seems like it usually sells at ove £100.
The plan is to subject many, many many culture slants from the wildtype sclerotia samples to various mutagenic chemicals
as wildtype ergot according to Kren, the author of The Genus Claviceps seems to explain that wild types tend to be either nonproductive strains or extremely low, plenty of reports out there of them going as low as 3-4% alkaloid yield.
Getting growth and prduction media mixed up ready for use straight out of a container.
Growth and production need to be separate however, as ergot vegetative growth is favoured by a culture medium thats high in phosphorus, but P acts as a repressor of alkaloid production whilst the fungus gets about its business, so after growth the culture needs a washout of the medium followed by its replacement with a medium tailored towards lysergamide production.
I reckon this project of mine is going to end up being THE most detailed, possibly most difficult even, and careful (Claviceps spp. are highly toxic, the ergopeptides like ergotamine are powerful adrenoreceptor agonists and cause very severe vasoconstriction in case of poisoning.) It is the fungus that smote the middle and darker ages with poisoned, ergoty bread for the poor fucking commoner plebs. Powerful enough vasoconstrictor to cause a gangrenous poisoning. Although also it sometimes, due to the similar compounds in there to LSD, cause a hallucinatory psychotic reaction, possibly with bits dropping off the peasants at the same time. Lol, talk about a bad trip 
But when got to a productive stage, a properly mutated strain with the right production media and the right method of stabilizing the fungal hyphae in a pseudosclerotial manner, such as in alginate polymer microspheres has in some cases been shown to produce up to 7-8g of ergopeptides and simple lysergic acid derivatives per liter of medium.
Such a strain, should I manage to succeed in mutating one, would be an incredibly valuable product, both for lysergic acid/ergopeptide production oneself, and others with similar hobbies to one's own, would be fighting like killkenny cats to get hold of it. Of course ergotamine and its relative ergopeptides, and even more so, lysergic acid itself are watched tightly as hell by LEOs (fucking cocksucking rat bastard whoresons of crow-eaten bitches). So an un-traceable, productive C.purpurea or C.paspali strain would be extremely valuable; I could simply name my price and tell people if they do not like it, get it from somewhere else, or pick wild ergot sclerotia and do all the mutation work, colorimetric testing for ergot alkaloids, microscopy, tweaking and modifying culture media until I have them just perfect, and applying all the lesser known but effective and interesting techniques that I've dug up from all the hundreds and hundreds of journal references I've read, such as for instance, electrospraying a solution of the fungus hyphae, finely blended up, via a syringe driver with an electrically charged needle, grounded in the hardening solution for alginate polymer, to obtain microspheres which simulate sclerotial growth, which is when the fungus produces, and including perfluoroalkane emulsions in the alginate mix, as many of them have a fantastic ability to dissolve and transport O2, which is critical to alkaloid production, including surfectants such as Tweens in the medium itself, to lower surface tension of the water, and allow easier uptake of both O2 and nutrients by the cultures.
Hard, complex, etc. Certainly, but one thing I do know, is it is going to be fun 
ACAB 
