Wpływ anestetyków wziewnych na modelową błonę biologiczną

General anesthesia is defined as impairment of the central nervous system (UON) caused by intravenous or volatile anesthetics. The state of loss of consciousness or even amnesia and the disappearance of perception into external stimuli is achieved by the use of a large group of chemical compounds. The use of nitrous oxide in 1844 revolutionized surgery and medicine at that time. From that moment, anesthesiology develops dynamically, allowing more and more complex procedures. Despite more than 170 years of history of anesthesia, understanding the mechanism of reversible loss of awareness and sensitivity to pain caused by the action of general anesthetics is one of the greatest challenges of modern pharmacology and neuroscience. Incredibly high diversity of anesthetics, including both noble gases and complex steroids, combined with human sensation makes the above problem extremely difficult to solve. The reversibility of the anesthesia phenomenon suggests that the analyzed phenomenon is based on disturbance of weak intermolecular interactions, such as hydrogen bond or van der Walls forces. Anesthetic molecules may bind directly to the hydrophobic region of protein, which causes its conformational changes or disturb ion channel activity by anesthetic-induced perturbations of lipid bilayers. The mechanism of anesthesia is thus very often attributed to both protein and lipid membrane targets. The influence of anesthetic molecules on biomolecular systems can be studied successfully using many different physico-chemical methods, such as, infrared, fluorescence or nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Vibrational circular dichroism as well as differential scanning calorimetry can also be used.