Abstract: synthetic cannabinoids themselves are the chemicals that present a strong affinity to the body’s cannabinoid receptors, thereby exhibiting the effects of natural cannabimimetics such as Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol.
In recent decades, synthetic cannabinoids have begun to take a huge percentage of the black market of psychoactive substances, causing an increasing need to study their psychoactive effects in the body. Synthetic cannabinoids and referred to the group of so-called “new psychoactive substances”, and the number of these compounds is constantly growing. In this regard, the chemical composition of the new psychoactive substances is mostly unknown, while the development of the screening methods for their determination takes huge amount of time, and in these facts, development of the rapid methods for the screening of potential narcogenicity is in urgent need. On the possible ways to establish narcogenicity is to determine the changes in the concentrations of neurotransmitters as a response to the chemical exposure.
Determination of the neuroactivity is most of the time carried out in mammals. The use of mammals for experimental purposes is associated with a plenty of limitations, including the complexity of handling and maintenance of the facility, the complexity of carrying of the experiments, and the impossibility of making a sample that would represent the information about the whole organism.
In recent decades, the use of zebrafish (Danio rerio) as a model organism has begun to gain popularity. The main advantages of zebrafish over mammals include the ease of handling, relatively low maintenance cost, and the possibility to analyze the compounds throughout the body due to a small body size.
In the present study we investigate the changes in the concentrations of endobiotics associated with various neurotransmitter systems after insertion of the synthetic cannabinoid 5F-APINAC using metabolomics methods in rabbit and zebrafish (Danio rerio) models.
Keywords: metabolomics; new psychoactive substances; synthetic cannabinoids; neurotransmitters; tryptophan metabolism; zebrafish; rabbits