PROJECT #19012 RESEARCH FOR CANNABINOID
FOLDING PERFORMANCE PROFILE

PROJECT SUMMARY

Cannabinoid Receptors Cannabinoid receptors (CBs) are part of the endocannabinoid signaling system, which help to maintain homeostasis in neuron signaling to control pain, obesity, and other neurological disorders.

Therefore, synthetic cannabinoids (SCs) were designed and tested to target CBs as potential therapeutical selective drugs.

Initially, SCs were designed by modulating the scaffolds of known phytocannabinoids.

However, chemically diverse synthetic cannabinoids (Novel Psychoactive Substance (NPS)) were
discovered rapidly, which have a high affinity towards CBs and significantly modulate the receptor activities.

These molecules were started to get sold in the market as abusive drugs under different brand names (e.g., K2, spice) and caused thousands of hospitalizations of patients across the US due to more adverse effects, including impairment of fine motor skills and increased blood pressure, tachycardia.

It is hypothesized that β-arrestin biased downstream signaling of these NPSs causes more adversarial effects compared to classical cannabinoids.

However, how these classical and non-classical cannabinoids affect receptor conformational dynamics distinctly,
has not been mechanistically studied.

In this project, we compare the unbinding mechanism and kinetics of a non-classical cannabinoid, MDMB-Fubinaca, and a classical cannabinoid, HU-210, using biased and unbiased simulation..

PROJECT INFO

Manager(s): Soumajit Dutta

Institution: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Project URL: shuklagroup.org/

PROJECT WORK UNIT SUMMARY

Atoms: 90,246

Core: 0x22

Status: Public