When the researchers evaluated the effects of PET compared with THC on inflammation pathways in mouse brains, they finally found a difference. They also discovered THC-like effects when PET was administered to mice-the animals responded similarly to both treatments, including moving more slowly and having lower body temperatures.
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The team then examined how PET and THC compare in potency, and found PET to be less potent. They also checked to see if the PETs bound brain proteins that THC doesn’t-they don’t. Using cell preparations, the research team checked to see if the PET molecules bound to the same brain receptors in the cell membrane as THC-and they do. To establish this strong similarity, the investigators synthesized forms of PET based on the naturally occurring compound. “This is solid work, very credible, showing that this type of liverwort contains compounds that are akin both in structure and pharmaceutical activity to psychoactive cannabinoids in the cannabis plant.” “Curiosity-driven research can lead to interesting results,” says Daniele Piomelli, professor of anatomy and neurobiology at the University of California, Irvine, who was not involved in the study. Publishing October 24 in Science Advances, the researchers show through a variety of tests that PET from these Radula species looks and acts a lot like THC from Cannabis. In what may be the only chemical synthesis paper ever to thank incense sellers in its acknowledgments, Jürg Gertsch of the University of Bern and colleagues confirmed the properties of PET that make it similar to THC. Although researchers first described perrottetinene in 1994, how it compared with THC in structure and activity in mammalian brains did not become clear until now. The Radula compound has been dubbed perrottetinene, or PET, after Radula perrottetii, one of the few liverwort species that makes it. What we now know, however, is the cannabinoid from liverwort and the one in Cannabis are almost exactly the same and have quite similar effects in the mammalian brain. Why a liverwort, which lives and reproduces quite differently from a plant like Cannabis, would make this molecule remains a mystery. One genus of the plant, Radula, boasts a handful of species that produce a chemical that is a lot like tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) from Cannabis sativa, or marijuana. The recent discovery of another source of a cannabinoid comes from a plant that is a relative of the mosses called liverwort.
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Somehow, in the vast expanse of geologic time that followed, a few members of these distantly related groups in the plant kingdom copied one another in making something of great interest to humans: the psychoactive chemical, or cannabinoid, that gets people high. Several hundred million years ago mosses and their kin went one way, evolutionarily speaking, and the lineage of trees and flowering plants went the other.