Nature
January 1, 2021
Lindsay P Cameron, Robert J Tombari, Ju Lu et al.
468 citations
Ibogaine, a psychedelic alkaloid, shows anti-addictive effects in humans and animals but has safety issues including toxicity and heart arrhythmias. Researchers engineered tabernanthalog, a water-soluble, non-hallucinogenic, non-toxic analogue made in a single step. In rodents, tabernanthalog promoted structural neural plasticity, reduced alcohol- and heroin-seeking behavior, and produced antidepressant-like effects. This demonstrates that careful chemical design can create safer, non-hallucinogenic variants of psychedelic compounds with therapeutic potential.
Molecular Psychiatry
May 25, 2021
Ju Lu, Michelle Tjia, Brian Mullen et al.
87 citations
A single dose of the psychedelic analog tabernanthalog (TBG) reduces anxiety and reverses stress-induced deficits in sensory processing and cognitive flexibility in mice exposed to unpredictable mild stress. TBG promotes regrowth of dendritic spines lost during stress, lowers baseline neuronal activity, and enhances whisking-related modulation in the somatosensory cortex. In a texture discrimination task, novel textures activate a greater proportion of cortical neurons than familiar ones; this differential response is diminished by stress and restored by TBG. The findings indicate TBG combats stress effects by modulating basal and stimulus-dependent neural activity in cortical networks.
Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience
October 12, 2021
Kacper Łukasiewicz, Jacob J. Baker, Yi Zuo et al.
32 citations
Psychedelics, which have been used for centuries, can dramatically alter conscious experience. Recent research indicates that certain psychedelics promote neural plasticity by stimulating neurite growth and synapse formation. This review concentrates on classical serotonergic psychedelics and their role in neural plasticity, discussing how this mechanism may underlie their therapeutic potential.
bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology
June 18, 2026
Jacob J Baker, Emily Kogan, Shaorong Ma et al.
Psilocybin promotes the formation and maturation of synapses while accelerating the elimination of pre-existing synapses. Signaling through serotonin 2A receptors in cortical layer 5 pyramidal neurons is necessary and sufficient for this synaptic remodeling but is not required for the head-twitch response, a rodent proxy for hallucination.