Smith Jordan, Zadeh Haghighi Hadi, Salahub Dennis, Simon Christoph
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Institute for Quantum Science and Technology, Quantum Alberta, and Hotchkiss Brain Institute, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, T2N 1N4, Canada.
Department of Chemistry, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Institute for Quantum Science and Technology, Quantum Alberta, Centre for Molecular Simulation, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, T2N 1N4, Canada.
Sci Rep. 2021 Mar 18;11(1):6287. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-85673-w.
Understanding the mechanisms underlying general anesthesia would be a key step towards understanding consciousness. The process of xenon-induced general anesthesia has been shown to involve electron transfer, and the potency of xenon as a general anesthetic exhibits isotopic dependence. We propose that these observations can be explained by a mechanism in which the xenon nuclear spin influences the recombination dynamics of a naturally occurring radical pair of electrons. We develop a simple model inspired by the body of work on the radical-pair mechanism in cryptochrome in the context of avian magnetoreception, and we show that our model can reproduce the observed isotopic dependence of the general anesthetic potency of xenon in mice. Our results are consistent with the idea that radical pairs of electrons with entangled spins could be important for consciousness.
理解全身麻醉背后的机制将是迈向理解意识的关键一步。氙气诱导全身麻醉的过程已被证明涉及电子转移，并且氙气作为全身麻醉剂的效力表现出同位素依赖性。我们提出，这些观察结果可以通过一种机制来解释，即氙原子核自旋影响天然存在的电子自由基对的复合动力学。我们基于鸟类磁感受中隐花色素自由基对机制的研究成果开发了一个简单模型，并表明我们的模型能够重现观察到的氙气对小鼠全身麻醉效力的同位素依赖性。我们的结果与具有纠缠自旋的电子自由基对可能对意识很重要这一观点一致。
