DIARY OF A BIOCHEM MAJOR

Okay I’m not going to lie, just looking at this structure screams “Oh hai thar, Ima goin’ to explode now”. Usually when you have a bunch of nitrogen’s bonded together (especially in a ring) you get some “interesting” results, and by interesting I mean you typically end up with a rather large hole in the ground (see here and here).

Much to my surprise, pentylenetetrazol is actually used as a drug and not a high explosive. It can act as a stimulant, but it appears to like its job a bit too much as it can cause seizures which I’m sure everyone reading this would love to experience (and if you thought caffeine jitters were bad…). It apparently works by taking the place of GABA (responsible for calming us down and generally keeping the body from getting too excited) in the GABA receptor protein which causes the body to not slow down at all. It also appears to decrease the recovery time after a neuron fires which could also play a role in how drug’s mechanism of action.

Interestingly, the drug also appears to be able to treat Down syndrome which would be great, minus the whole inducing seizures thing.

This was actually one of the cooler drugs I’ve seen in awhile! I would have never had predicted that this thing would be stable, let alone a drug. But hey that’s chemistry! I typically follow the old saying: If you got what you expected, you did it wrong.