Danielle M Gerhard, Santosh Pothula, Rong-Jian Liu, Min Wu, Xiao-Yuan Li, Matthew J Girgenti, Seth R Taylor, Catharine H Duman, Eric Delpire, Marina Picciotto, Eric S Wohleb, Ronald S Duman
A single sub-anesthetic dose of ketamine, an NMDA receptor (NMDAR) antagonist, produces rapid and sustained antidepressant actions in depressed patients, addressing a major unmet need for the treatment of mood disorders. Ketamine produces a rapid increase in extracellular glutamate and synaptic formation in the prefrontal cortex, but the initial cellular trigger that initiates these and its behavioral actions has not been identified. To address this question, we used a combination of viral shRNA and conditional mutation to produce cell specific knockdown or deletion of a key NMDAR subunit, GluN2B, implicated in the actions of ketamine...
November 19, 2019: Journal of Clinical Investigation