An analog of psychedelics restores functional neural circuits disrupted by unpredictable stress
Molecular Psychiatry – May 25, 2021
Source: OpenAlex
Summary
A single dose of the psychedelic analog tabernanthalog (TBG) remarkably reverses stress-induced anxiety and sensory processing deficits. This Neuroscience finding reveals TBG promotes regrowth of excitatory neuron connections in the somatosensory system lost due to stress. Through Psychedelics and Drug Studies, TBG modulates the biological neural network, enhancing premovement neuronal whisking activity and restoring sensory system function. This suggests a powerful Psychology approach to combat stress's detrimental effects on brain activity, likely via neurotransmitter receptor influence on behavior.
Abstract
Abstract Psychological stress affects a wide spectrum of brain functions and poses risks for many mental disorders. However, effective therapeutics to alleviate or revert its deleterious effects are lacking. A recently synthesized psychedelic analog tabernanthalog (TBG) has demonstrated anti-addictive and antidepressant potential. Whether TBG can rescue stress-induced affective, sensory, and cognitive deficits, and how it may achieve such effects by modulating neural circuits, remain unknown. Here we show that in mice exposed to unpredictable mild stress (UMS), administration of a single dose of TBG decreases their anxiety level and rescues deficits in sensory processing as well as in cognitive flexibility. Post-stress TBG treatment promotes the regrowth of excitatory neuron dendritic spines lost during UMS, decreases the baseline neuronal activity, and enhances whisking-modulation of neuronal activity in the somatosensory cortex. Moreover, calcium imaging in head-fixed mice performing a whisker-dependent texture discrimination task shows that novel textures elicit responses from a greater proportion of neurons in the somatosensory cortex than do familiar textures. Such differential response is diminished by UMS and is restored by TBG. Together, our study reveals the effects of UMS on cortical neuronal circuit activity patterns and demonstrate that TBG combats the detrimental effects of stress by modulating basal and stimulus-dependent neural activity in cortical networks.