Banisteriopsis caapi, the ayahuasca vine: botany, history, harmine and what the research shows

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Most writing about ayahuasca focuses on DMT. This article is about the other half of the story: the vine. It covers the plant’s botany and names, the people who documented it, its alkaloids, harmine research, the vine’s types and its conservation. For the brew as a whole, start with what is ayahuasca; for the molecule, our pillar what is DMT.

What kind of plant is Banisteriopsis caapi?

Banisteriopsis caapi is an Amazonian liana, a woody climbing vine (Chavarro-Mesa et al., 2024). It belongs to Banisteriopsis, a genus of the Malpighiaceae family with 61 species; most are South American, seven reach Central America and one is found only in Cuba. Its full scientific name is Banisteriopsis caapi (Spruce ex Griseb.) C.V. Morton (Santos et al., 2025). A 2018 genome paper calls it a native South American vine used for centuries by peoples of the Amazon basin (Ramachandran et al., 2018). Evidence: established.

It is the plant the word ayahuasca first referred to. A 2023 review notes that the vine is “also referred to as ayahuasca independently” of the brew (Ruffell et al., 2023), and a 2023 history paper shows that the “ayahuasca” described by 19th-century explorers was the vine itself, as distinct from the brew that spread to cities with the Brazilian churches from the 1960s (Lima and Marinho, 2023). Today, ayahuasca is a brew usually combining this vine with a DMT-containing plant; see what is ayahuasca. Evidence: established.

Where does the name Banisteriopsis caapi come from?

The species was first classified in the 19th century by the German botanist August Grisebach, from material the British botanist Richard Spruce had collected near the Uaupés River, under the name Banisteria caapi (Lima and Marinho, 2023). Under the conventions of botanical naming, the “Spruce ex Griseb.” in the full name records that link, and “C.V. Morton” names the botanist credited with placing the species in Banisteriopsis (Santos et al., 2025). The species name, caapi, is itself an Indigenous name: the 2023 history lists caapi as the Baniwa name for the drink (Lima and Marinho, 2023). Evidence: established.

Where the species first arose is harder. A 2025 dated family tree of 38 Banisteriopsis species, built from plastid and nuclear DNA, places the genus’s origin in the Miocene, about 22 million years ago. The authors note that most herbarium records of B. caapi come from plants cultivated by Indigenous peoples, which makes its native range hard to pin down, but their results point to an ancient, probably Amazonian, origin with no evidence that human selection shaped the species’ divergence (Santos et al., 2025). Evidence: preliminary (one phylogenetic study).

Why is it called the “vine of the soul”? Names for the ayahuasca vine

Ayahuasca is a Quechua word, from aya and waska, usually glossed as “vine of the soul” or “vine of the dead”; our ayahuasca meaning and pronunciation guide sets out which sources give which reading. The 2018 paper that sequenced the vine’s chloroplast genome is even titled “Sequencing the Vine of the Soul” (Ramachandran et al., 2018). Evidence: established that both translations are in print.

Other peoples use other names. Along the Uaupés River in the upper Rio Negro, the Desana call the plant gaapi, and Gaapi is also a divinity in their creation story from whom the Desana descend (Lima and Marinho, 2023). In Brazil, the vine is known as mariri or jagube (Chavarro-Mesa et al., 2024). The Brazilian religions that institutionalised ayahuasca use in the 20th century, including the União do Vegetal and Santo Daime, also recognise named types of the vine (below) (Biazatti et al., 2026); their history is in Santo Daime and UDV: the ayahuasca churches. Evidence: established.

“Yagé vine” comes from yagé, which the 2023 history gives as the Siona name, and older scientific writing called it yagé or caapi more often than ayahuasca (Lima and Marinho, 2023). Uses varied too: a 2021 study describes the Awajún of Peru using the vine on its own in an initiation rite (Politi et al., 2021). Evidence: established as the ethnographic accounts; preparation and amounts are not reproduced here.

Who first described the ayahuasca vine? Richard Spruce and the explorers

Richard Spruce spent 15 years travelling in the Amazon, stayed among peoples including the Tukano, and is thought to be the first to collect caapi and send it to European herbaria, in the early 1850s. Sources give 1851 or 1853. His observations were reported in 1873 and reached a wide public in 1908, in his two-volume Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and Andes, edited by Alfred Russel Wallace (Lima and Marinho, 2023). A 2023 review dates the documented history of ayahuasca in the Amazon to about 150 years ago, to Spruce (Ruffell et al., 2023). Evidence: established; the collection year is unresolved.

These accounts have limits. The 2023 history argues that explorers’ reports often misrepresented Indigenous uses and meanings. Spruce mentioned the Dabucuri, an exchange ritual of the north-west Amazon in which caapi is shared, without analysing it; 23 ethnic groups from four language families still practise it (Lima and Marinho, 2023). Evidence: established as the paper’s account; the critique is the authors’.

What did Richard Evans Schultes find?

Richard Evans Schultes (1915–2001) was a 20th-century ethnobotanist whose research centred on hallucinogenic plants of the Amazon (Sheldrake, 2020). In 1957 he published a 56-page study in Harvard’s Botanical Museum Leaflets titled “The identity of the malpighiaceous narcotics of South America” (Schultes, 1957). He and the anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff noted that older reports often gave only the genus name, so it can be unclear which Banisteriopsis species they meant (Lima and Marinho, 2023). Evidence: established for the publications; we read the 1957 study’s record, not its text.

A 2020 history of science paper examines what it calls Schultes’s “enigma”: Amazonian people could tell apart local varieties of the vine that he, a trained botanist, could not distinguish. The paper also discusses his writing about Spruce and his own accounts of altered states, and argues that the enigma shows the limits of what ethnobotany can learn from outside a culture (Sheldrake, 2020). Evidence: established as a historical interpretation; the conclusions are the author’s.

What were telepathine, yageine and banisterine?

Three early names for one molecule. In 1923 the Colombian physician Fischer Cárdenas isolated an alkaloid from the vine and named it telepatina, “telepathine”, after a naturalist who had linked the plant to telepathy. In 1925 the Colombian researcher Antonio María Barriga Villalba isolated two alkaloids he called yageína and yaginina. Two years later the pharmacologist Louis Lewin, in Europe, named one banisterina. Telepathine, yageine and banisterine all proved to be harmine; whether yaginine was one of the vine’s other alkaloids was left to later chemistry (Lima and Marinho, 2023). Evidence: established.

What are harmine, harmaline and tetrahydroharmine?

They are β-carbolines (beta-carbolines), a group of plant alkaloids. A 1984 analysis reported that B. caapi contains harmine, harmaline and tetrahydroharmine, while the DMT in ayahuasca comes from other plants. It found that β-carbolines are highly active, reversible inhibitors of monoamine oxidase (MAO) in a test-tube assay, and that their effects in mixtures were additive (McKenna, Towers and Abbott, 1984). Evidence: established.

The three do not act alike. A 1999 study of 15 volunteers in a ceremonial setting describes harmine and harmaline as reversible inhibitors of MAO-A, while tetrahydroharmine weakly blocks the reuptake of serotonin (Callaway et al., 1999). In a double-blind, placebo-controlled study of 18 volunteers, harmine was barely detectable in blood, which suggested it acts mainly in the gut and liver (Riba et al., 2003). How that lets swallowed DMT survive is explained in why DMT breaks down so fast. Evidence: established in outline.

“Reversible” matters. A 2022 review explains that an older class of antidepressants inhibits MAO-A and MAO-B completely and irreversibly, while reversible, competitive inhibitors such as β-carbolines can almost never achieve complete inhibition. It adds that β-carbolines also occur in many foods and in tobacco, and that the level of MAO inhibition needed to affect brain chemistry has not been established (Berlowitz, Egger and Cumming, 2022). Evidence: established for the mechanism; unresolved for the threshold.

Does Banisteriopsis caapi contain DMT?

Not according to the analyses we read. The 1984 study lists the vine’s alkaloids as harmine, harmaline and tetrahydroharmine and attributes ayahuasca’s DMT to other plants (McKenna, Towers and Abbott, 1984); a 2024 genome paper likewise describes the vine as supplying the β-carbolines and another plant supplying the DMT (Chavarro-Mesa et al., 2024). That is the whole point of the pairing, and why the vine alone is not “DMT”. For where DMT does occur in nature, see where does DMT come from in nature. Evidence: established.

What does research on harmine show?

Harmine is studied well beyond ayahuasca, largely because it also blocks DYRK1A, a kinase (an enzyme that switches other proteins on or off) that regulates cell proliferation and brain development (Dakic et al., 2016). Almost all of this work is in cells or animals. None of the studies below shows that the vine or the brew treats anything. Evidence: preliminary.

In 2015, a high-throughput screen of small molecules found that harmine and its analogues make human pancreatic beta cells, the cells that make insulin, divide. In three mouse and human-islet models, harmine increased beta-cell proliferation and islet mass and improved blood-sugar control in mice (Wang et al., 2015). Beta cells barely divide after early childhood, which is why the finding drew attention. Evidence: preliminary (cells and mice).

In the brain, two cell studies point the same way. Human neural progenitor cells, grown from stem cells, multiplied when treated with harmine, and a DYRK1A blocker did the same while a pure MAO inhibitor did not, suggesting DYRK1A rather than MAO is involved (Dakic et al., 2016). In cells taken from adult mouse brains, harmine, harmaline, tetrahydroharmine and the metabolite harmol all stimulated stem-cell proliferation and the formation of new neurons (Morales-García et al., 2017). Evidence: preliminary (in cells).

Human data on harmine alone are thin. In the first phase 1 study of pure, pharmaceutical-grade harmine, 25 healthy adults took a single oral dose in an open-label, ascending-dose design (doses not reproduced here). Side effects such as vomiting and drowsiness rose with dose, psychoactive effects were limited, and there were no serious adverse events (Ables et al., 2024). For what ayahuasca research has found overall, see ayahuasca benefits: what research shows. Evidence: preliminary.

Are there different types of caapi?

Yes, as recognised by the people who use it. Brazilian ayahuasca religions first registered two folk types, Caupuri and Tucunaca, and later sampling added others such as Arara, Pajezinho and Ourinho. In a 2026 study of 47 vine plants, mostly B. caapi folk types, machine-learning models trained on photographs of dried herbarium leaves sorted them with about 70% accuracy overall and over 90% for the types Hybrid and Arara, but did worse for Cabi and Quebrador, which overlap in leaf form. The results only partly matched earlier ethnobotanical classifications (Biazatti et al., 2026). Evidence: preliminary.

Genetics and chemistry show variation too. A 2024 sequencing of the vine’s mitochondrial genome confirmed its sample as the Tucunacá type, matching its identification by form (Chavarro-Mesa et al., 2024). A chemical survey its authors describe as the largest of its kind analysed 159 B. caapi samples from several Brazilian regions and found high variability in their β-carboline content; samples from native plants had significantly more harmine than cultivated ones, and some regions differed in tetrahydroharmine (Santos et al., 2020). The authors call this variability a challenge for standardised research (amounts not reproduced here). Evidence: preliminary; why types differ is unresolved.

Is the ayahuasca vine under threat?

Wild populations are under pressure in at least one region studied. A 2023 demographic study of B. caapi in the Peruvian Amazon modelled populations under high and low harvest pressure. Heavy harvesting raised the death rate of the largest vines. Over the long term, heavily harvested populations were projected to shrink by 1.3% a year while lightly harvested ones grew by 3.2%; in the short term, all the populations studied were declining. The authors recommend protecting the largest vines (Coe and Gaoue, 2023). Evidence: preliminary (one region, model projections).

The concern is also cultural. The 2026 folk-type study notes that growing global use of ayahuasca has led Peruvian shamans to denounce what they call “spiritual extractivism” of the plants, and that only about 10% of ayahuasca users worldwide are estimated to belong to Indigenous populations (Biazatti et al., 2026). Evidence: preliminary (estimates reported by the authors from other studies).

Is Banisteriopsis caapi legal in Canada?

In the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, harmaline (item 9) and harmalol (item 10) are listed in Schedule III, while harmine and the vine itself are not named in the Act (consolidation current to 30 September 2026) (Justice Laws, CDSA). This is general information, not legal advice; for the brew, see what is ayahuasca. Evidence: established for what the Act lists.

What we still don’t know

• Where B. caapi is truly native (unresolved).
• Whether named folk types are distinct lineages, chemical forms, or both (unresolved).
• Whether any harmine finding in cells or mice holds in people. The first human study of pure harmine was small and open-label (unresolved).
• How much MAO inhibition is needed to change brain chemistry, and how that varies between people (unresolved).
• How fast wild populations are declining outside the one Peruvian region studied (unresolved).

The fair summary: Banisteriopsis caapi is a woody Amazonian vine with a long cultural history and a short scientific one. Its harmine and related alkaloids are reversible MAO inhibitors, with documented interaction risks and an early research literature. For how the vine’s chemistry changes the experience of DMT, read ayahuasca vs DMT.

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