Scientists from Scripps Research have shown how anesthetics cause clusters of lipids in the cell membrane to disintegrate, triggering downstream processes that cause a loss of consciousness.
Anesthesia is among the greatest mysteries of neuroscience. In spite of health experts using it every day for more than 150 years, the molecular system by which basic anesthetics produce their effects is unclear.
Beyond being a medical quandary that could cause the design of better anesthetics, the mechanism of anesthesia might be associated with how we sleep, the nature of awareness, and conditions associated with these states.
The first successful demonstration of an anesthetic to create a loss of consciousness was in 1846 at the Massachusetts General Health Center in Boston.
Scientist later on noted that the potency of anesthetics is related to their solubility in lipids, which are present in the membranes of cells in the body. This caused the “lipid hypothesis” of general anesthetic action, but precisely how modifications in membrane lipids generate unconsciousness has stayed a mystery.
In a recent study in the journal PNAS, researchers from Scripps Research study in San Diego, CA, explain the system behind general anesthesia in unmatched detail.
The proposed mechanism is based upon, but might not specify to, the disruption of heterogeneous clusters of lipids called lipid rafts. This sets off the opening of ion channels and eventually stops neurons from firing.
Researcher Dr. Richard Lerner, the founder of Scripps Research study’s Florida campus in Jupiter, explains anesthesia as the “granddaddy” of medical secrets.
” When I was in medical school at Stanford, this was the one problem I wanted to resolve. Anesthesia was of such practical value I could not think we didn’t know how all of these anesthetics could trigger individuals to lose consciousness.”
To shed some light on the secret, Dr. Lerner and coworkers utilized a mix of nanoscale microscopy