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British Journal of Anaesthesia, 2001, Vol. 87, No. 3 380-384
© 2001 The Board of Management and Trustees of the British Journal of Anaesthesia

Editorial

Editorial II

Fatty acid amides are putative endogenous ligands for anaesthetic recognition sites in mammalian CNS

D. Laws, B. Verdon, L. Coyne and G. Lees

‘To sleep, perchance to dream’ W. Shakespeare

The pioneering work of Meyer and, concurrently but independently, Overton over a century ago, demonstrated that the potency of anaesthetics within a homologous series correlated with their ability to partition out of aqueous solvents into lipids such as octanol. This suggested to several generations of researchers pursuing mechanisms of action, that the molecules were exerting a non-selective physical perturbation of a lipid site in membranes or possibly perturbing the volume or fluidity of the plasma membrane itself.1 Lipid theories of anaesthetic action have been increasingly marginalized by researchers uncovering substantive evidence that proteins (first the globular luciferases, then, increasingly, native or recombinant ion channels) can bear saturable stereoselective sites for modulation by ‘clinical concentrations’ of a broad spectrum of anaesthetic drugs.2 Furthermore, these drugs exhibit the same structure–activity profiles in vitro at the channel targets as they do in patients.3 Perhaps the most . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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