Abstract

Recent evidence suggests that psychedelic drugs can exert beneficial effects on anxiety, depression, and ethanol and nicotine abuse in humans. However, their hallucinogenic side-effects often preclude their clinical use. Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is a prototypical hallucinogen and its psychedelic actions are exerted through the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor (5-HT2AR). 5-HT2AR activation stimulates Gq- and β-arrestin- (βArr) mediated signaling. To separate these signaling modalities, we have used βArr1 and βArr2 mice. We find that LSD stimulates motor activities to similar extents in WT and βArr1-KO mice, without effects in βArr2-KOs. LSD robustly stimulates many surrogates of psychedelic drug actions including head twitches, grooming, retrograde walking, and nose-poking in WT and βArr1-KO animals. By contrast, in βArr2-KO mice head twitch responses are low with LSD and this psychedelic is without effects on other surrogates. The 5-HT2AR antagonist MDL100907 (MDL) blocks the LSD effects. LSD also disrupts prepulse inhibition (PPI) in WT and βArr1-KOs, but not in βArr2-KOs. MDL restores LSD-mediated disruption of PPI in WT mice; haloperidol is required for normalization of PPI in βArr1-KOs. Collectively, these results reveal that LSD’s psychedelic drug-like actions appear to require βArr2.

Highlights

  • Recent evidence suggests that psychedelic drugs can exert beneficial effects on anxiety, depression, and ethanol and nicotine abuse in humans

  • Since Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is βArr biased at the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor (5-HT2AR), the present investigations were conducted to determine whether LSD produces behavioral effects that were differential among the wild-type (WT) and β-arrestin 1 (βArr1)-KO, and WT and βArr2-KO mice

  • The Arrb[1] or Arrb[2] genes were obtained from 129 libraries, the constructs were injected into ES cells that were microinjected into C57BL/6 b­ lastocysts[30,31]

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Summary

Introduction

Recent evidence suggests that psychedelic drugs can exert beneficial effects on anxiety, depression, and ethanol and nicotine abuse in humans. Since LSD-induced states bear many similarities to early acute phases of ­psychosis[2] and because serotonin (5-HT) and LSD both contain an indolamine moiety, Woolley and S­ haw[3] proposed that aberrant 5-HT levels in brain may produce mental disturbances including psychosis This suggestion gave rise to the 5-HT hypothesis for schizophrenia and stimulated researchers to study LSD in hopes of gaining a better understanding of the disorder. LSD activates G protein signaling at many ­GPCRs10, this psychedelic stimulates βArr-mediated responses at most tested biogenic amine ­GPCRs8. Since LSD is βArr biased at the 5-HT2AR, the present investigations were conducted to determine whether LSD produces behavioral effects that were differential among the wild-type (WT) and βArr1-KO, and WT and βArr2-KO mice

Methods
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