These days, it is hard to imagine having a surgical procedure without anaesthetics. Yet some 170 years after their first use in medicine, the way in which these drugs exert their hypnotic effects remains a mystery. Writing in Current Biology, Moore etal. shed light on the question.Many biological molecules are sensitive to anaesthetics, among them membrane ion-channel proteins. To make matters more complex, there are dozens of anaesthetic agents, and yet they don't seem to share a single molecular target. An emerging theory is that these drugs inhibit the neural circuitry associated with wakefulness. Moore and colleagues asked whether they also affect sleep-promoting neurons.
展开▼
