Does ketamine target olfactory receptors in the brain?

Steffen Wolf1, Hanns Hatt2, Oliver P Ernst3

  • 1Department of Biophysics, Ruhr-University Bochum, 44780 Bochum, Germany. Department of Biophysics, CAS-MPG Partner Institute for Computational Biology, Key Laboratory of Computational Biology, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, P.R. China.

Science Signaling
|April 2, 2015
PubMed
Summary

Ketamine, an anesthetic, activates specific olfactory receptors in mouse brains. This suggests that ketamine may target similar G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) in humans, offering new insights into its mechanism of action.

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