Psilocybe cubensis (Earle) Singer
What a cubensis strain name does and does not tell you
How cubensis strains arise from wild collections, selection, mutations and crosses, why one name can hide different cultures, and what genome data show.
- Updated
- 10 October 2026
- Cards
- 6
Card 01Summary
A cubensis "strain" is a culture line kept and named by growers or sellers. Golden Teacher, B+, Ecuador and Penis Envy are not species or botanical varieties: they have no published description, no reference specimen and no register. A strain name tells you which line a supplier says it is selling. It does not guarantee a genetic identity, a place of origin or a potency, and the same name from two suppliers can refer to different cultures.
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Four kinds of names in one species
All the names in the strain index belong to a single species, Psilocybe cubensis. They fall into four groups, and the group says something about what the name can mean.
| Kind of name | Examples | What it refers to | What can be checked |
|---|---|---|---|
| Formal taxon | P. cubensis, var. cyanescens | a published description with a type specimen | the description and the specimen |
| Place name | Ecuador, Cambodian, Mazatapec, Hawaii | a claimed collection site of the founding material | rarely documented |
| Trait name | Albino A+, Enigma, Penis Envy | a visible feature: colour, shape | the feature itself, in the mushroom |
| Trade or breeder name | Golden Teacher, B+, McKennaii, Jack Frost | whatever the person naming it chose | nothing beyond the supplier's word |
The 2025 review of cubensis strains in the Journal of Fungi is explicit about the source of strain descriptions: they are "predominantly sourced from non-academic, community-based reports", partly because legal restrictions have limited academic research (Kurzbaum et al., 2025).
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How new lines arise
The same review attributes the growth in the number of strains to "extensive cultivation experiments and selective breeding" within grower communities. In practice there are four routes.
Wild collections. Someone takes spores or tissue from wild mushrooms, for example on a pasture in Ecuador or Thailand, and keeps the culture going. The place name sticks. Whether the founding collection really came from that place, and whether the line sold today still descends from it, is almost never documented.
Selection. A grower picks the mushrooms with the wanted traits, such as large caps, fast growth or many fruit bodies, and propagates from those. Repeated over generations, this produces a line that differs from where it started. It also narrows the genetic base.
Spontaneous variants. Some lines are said to go back to one unusual mushroom. Albino and leucistic forms lack the normal brown pigment and grow white; the review describes Albino A+ for its "distinctive white, leucistic fruiting bodies". The same review names Penis Envy for its "distinct morphological characteristics" and Enigma for "unique, blob-like formations that deviate from typical mushroom shapes".
Crosses. Combining two lines gives names such as Jack Frost × Golden Teacher or Jack Frost × Shakti, both included in a 2026 laboratory study of 14 strains (Sharchaton et al., 2026).
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Spores and clones are not the same thing
A mushroom releases millions of spores, and each spore carries its own combination of the parent's genes. A spore print or a spore syringe sold under a strain name is therefore a population of genetically different offspring. A grower who starts from spores gets variation, and may select from it.
A tissue culture, cut from the inside of one fruit body, keeps the genetics of that single mushroom. Lines maintained this way, often called isolates, are more uniform. A strain name does not tell you which of the two you are dealing with.
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Same name, different culture
Two pieces of research point the same way. The review notes that a genomic analysis of commercially labelled cultivars found that these "often lack genetic similarity across different suppliers": a culture sold as one strain by one supplier may be unrelated to a culture with the same name elsewhere.
The 2023 genome study in Current Biology compared 86 commercial cultivars with 38 wild isolates from Australia. The cultivars had low genetic diversity, low heterozygosity and signs of selfing and clonal propagation, and most descend from related populations. The genes that make psilocybin carried identical variants in most cultivars, although the authors note that some cultivars and the Australian population carry rarer variants that may affect how psilocybin and related compounds are made (McTaggart et al., 2023).
Put together: many strain names cover closely related, inbred cultures, a few lines carry genuinely different genes, and the label alone does not tell you which is which.
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What a name can tell you
- A trait you can see. If a line is sold as albino, white fruit bodies are a fair expectation. The other properties of that line remain unknown.
- A supplier's catalogue. A name identifies a product within one shop's range. Comparing the same name across shops compares two catalogues, possibly two cultures.
- Very little about strength. Laboratory results for named strains exist for a small number of lines, and differences between single mushrooms, harvests and storage conditions are large. The figures are on psilocybin content.
For what each name in the index stands for, see the strain index. How the species itself was named is on name and origin.