What is in morning glory seeds? The ergoline alkaloids

The seeds of Ipomoea tricolor contain a small amount of ergoline alkaloids, the same family of compounds that the ergot fungus makes on rye. The main one is ergine, also called LSA or lysergic acid amide, together with its isomer isoergine and a handful of others. They are made by a fungus that lives with the plant and is passed on through the seed. This page covers what was found, by whom and how much it varies. It contains no information about using the seeds.

Hofmann's surprise in 1960

In 1960 the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, who had made LSD at Sandoz in 1938, analysed two kinds of Mexican morning glory seeds sent to him by the American ethnobotanist R. Gordon Wasson: the round brown seeds of Turbina corymbosa (then Rivea corymbosa), called ololiuqui, and the long black seeds of the plant now named Ipomoea tricolor, collected among the Zapotec in Oaxaca. He presented his results at a congress in Australia on 18 August 1960 (Wasson, 1963).

He wrote later that the results were surprising. "The active principles of the Mexican morning glory drugs proved to be ergot alkaloids", with d-lysergic acid amide (ergine) and d-isolysergic acid amide (isoergine) as the two main components (Hofmann, 1963). Until then these compounds were known only from fungi. Finding them in a flowering plant was, in his words, "a most unexpected phytochemical discovery".

How much Hofmann measured

Hofmann's table gives the content of each alkaloid as a percentage of the seed weight. The I. tricolor sample was wild seed from Oaxaca, not a garden cultivar.

Source: Table I in Hofmann, 1963.

Two points stand out. The black Ipomoea seeds held about five times as much alkaloid as ololiuqui. And they contained ergometrine, a compound that makes the smooth muscle of the uterus contract (Wikipedia: Ergometrine). It is one of the reasons the seeds carry warnings for pregnancy (see risks).

Garden cultivars

Shortly afterwards, a group led by W. A. Taber tested seed of several commercially available morning glory varieties and found alkaloids in a number of these ornamental plants, as Hofmann noted in his 1963 review. Their methods could only estimate amounts roughly.

A modern analysis came from forensic chemists at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. They bought five packets of morning glory seed from ornamental plant shops and measured them with liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry (Nowak et al., 2016):

• Only three of the five packets contained ergot alkaloids. All three were labelled Heavenly Blue.
• Two packets of Ipomoea purpurea, the common morning glory, contained none at all.
• In each positive sample they identified ergine, ergometrine, lysergic acid α-hydroxyethylamide, penniclavine, chanoclavine and a compound that may be lysergol or one of its isomers.
• Averages for whole packets were similar to earlier literature, but single seeds from the same packet differed considerably in their ergine and ergometrine content.

In other words, the name on the packet says something about whether alkaloids are likely to be present, and very little about how much any one seed contains.

The hidden fungus

Hofmann checked his seeds for fungal infection, found none and concluded that the plant itself made the alkaloids. That conclusion did not hold. Ergot alkaloids are made only by fungi, and research since 2011 has shown that the morning glories which contain them carry a symbiotic fungus of the genus Periglandula, a relative of the ergot fungus that lives on the plant and is passed on through the seed (Steiner et al., 2011). A survey across the family found that ergot alkaloids in morning glories always occur together with Periglandula (Beaulieu et al., 2015).

For I. tricolor the fungus long escaped detection. In 2025 researchers at West Virginia University finally grew it from the inside of seed coats and described it as a new species, Periglandula clandestina. The type specimen came from commercial seed of 'Heavenly Blue', and the same fungus was found in 'Pearly Gates' and 'Flying Saucers' (Hazel and Panaccione, 2025). The fungus was most abundant in the seedling stem, while the alkaloids were present in all tissues, including the roots. An earlier study had already shown that young I. tricolor plants move lysergic acid amides from the seed into the roots (Beaulieu et al., 2013).

The likely function is defence. Ergot alkaloids can make plants more resistant to animals that feed on them above and below ground, and the 2013 study suggests that the way morning glories distribute them reflects selection for that (Beaulieu et al., 2013).

Ergine and LSD

Ergine is the plain amide of lysergic acid. LSD is the same molecule with two ethyl groups on the amide nitrogen. The two are close chemical relatives, which is why ergine is often described as "LSD-like", but it is a different compound. In receptor tests LSA bound to the same kinds of receptors as LSD, with lower affinity throughout (Paulke et al., 2013), and it has been studied far less. The UK and the US list ergine by name in their drug laws; see legal status.

Read on

• Risks of the seeds, including treated garden seed
• Ololiuqui and tlitliltzin, the Mexican background of Hofmann's samples
• The plant and the cultivar