IUBio

Some amphetamine affinities

BilZ0r BilZ0r at TAKETHISOUThotmail.com
Mon Feb 16 00:09:18 EST 2004


Well seeing you ask. I'm doing a masters thesis looking to see if the 
grey market stimulant Benzylpiperazine (BZP; MDMA like), is toxic to 
neurons in culture. The accepted theory on MDMA neurotoxicity states that 
dopamine gets release by MDMA, which is then taken up into serotonergic 
neurons, metabolised by MAO-B, which then releases free radicles, and is 
neurotoxic. Unfortuantly, that theory isn't very good, because a number 
of people have shown neurotoxicity in reserpinzed animals.

So the theory I was toying with was that the amphetamine gets taken up 
into its neuron of prefence (5-ht for MDMA, or DA for methamphetmine), 
and then metabolised by MAO-B which then leads to toxicity.

The way I was thinking of testing this hypothesis is:

if there is a tighter corelation between Dopamine Transporter and ed50 
toxicity, than there is between (MAO-B affinity times Monoamine 
transporter of preference affintiy) and ed50 of toxicity, then that would 
mean that the dopamine theory is right (i.e rate of dopamine release is 
related to toxicity). If it was the other way around, then the amphetmine 
metabolized by MAO-B theory was right (i.e. rate of amphetamine entery 
times affinity for MAO-B is related to toxicity).

"Glen M. Sizemore" <gmsizemore2 at yahoo.com> wrote in
news:e4a906362a300382496e1e1fab28cae2 at news.teranews.com: 

> BTW, do you need to know about these drugs specifically, or are you
> looking for compounds with different selectivities at the monoamine
> transporters? 
> 
> "BilZ0r" <BilZ0r at TAKETHISOUThotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:Xns948FB68E74FD3BilZ0rhotmailcom at 202.20.93.13...
>> Not that I'm really asking anyone here to do research for me, but no
>> one here would happen to be close to some information which says what
> affinity,
>> methamphetamine, mdma and mda have for the serotonin and dopamine
>> reuptake carrier, would they?
> 
> 




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