Application and prospect of drug discrimination in field of drug abuse / 中国药理学通报

Drug discrimination is a behavioral pharmacological technique to study the discriminative stimulus effects of drug. Currently drug discrimination has been widely used in preclinical drug development of CNS drugs, the most extensive of which is psychodependent research in the field of drug abuse. This review describes in general the basic principles of drug discrimination, preliminarily elaborates on the relevant characteristics and applications of the subjective effects, time-course effect, stereo specificity, individual differences, and receptor mechanisms, and its development prospects for hallucinogens and cannabis drugs are also presented.

The Role of MeCP2 in Substance Addiction / 中国生物化学与分子生物学报

Substance addiction is considered to be a chronic recurrent encephalopathy. The neural adap-tation changes induced by addictive substances are partly mediated by epigenetic mechanism. The perma￣nent changes of gene expression in tissues or brain can be affected by DNA methylation, histone modifica-tion and chromatin remodeling, these changes eventually lead to behavioral abnormalities of individual. Methyl-CpG binding protein 2 (MeCP2), an important transcription inhibitor, contains characteristic do-mains that regulated chromosome conformation, transcription and RNA splicing. It has also been identified that MeCP2 plays an important role in regulating neuronal plasticity and related target gene transcription during brain development, which add more attention about the importance of epigenetic mechanism in neuronal function. Studies have showed that DNA methylation, histone acetylation and phosphorylation regulate MeCP2 gene expression, affect gene and protein transcription, translation and cell regulation in learning, memory and substance addiction. Addictive substances induce psychological and mental dependence, which are related to the changes of neuronal plasticity and gene expression in addictive neural circuits. MeCP2 plays an important role in regulating synaptic transmission and neuronal plasticity in central nervous system. Therefore, it is of great scientific significance to explore the role of MeCP2 in regulating neuronal plasticity in the central nervous system. In this review we summarized the structure and function of MeCP2, the relationship between MeCP2 and epigenetics, and the role of MeCP2 epigenetic modifications induced by different addictive substances in substance addiction, which may provide further understanding of the molecular mechanism of substance addiction and provide new in￣sight for clinical intervention.