Researchers at Michigan Medicine have discovered the widespread presence of naturally occurring dimethyltryptamine (DMT), an increasingly popular hallucinogen, in the mammalian brain. They say this finding is the first step toward studying DMT—and figuring out its role—within the brains of humans.
Before studying the psychedelic, senior author Jimo Borjigin, Ph.D.’s research focused on melatonin production in the pineal gland. During her research, she became aware of the existence of a thriving community convinced of the pineal gland's mystical power, including Rick Strassman, Ph.D., from the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, who believed the pineal gland makes and secretes DMT.
"I said to myself, 'wait, I've worked on the pineal gland for years and have never heard of this.'" When she contacted Strassman, requesting the source of his statement, he admitted that it was just a hypothesis, which Borjigin then suggested they work together to test. "I thought if DMT is an endogenous monoamine, it should be very easy to detect using a fluorescence detector." Using a process in which microdialysis tubing is inserted into a rat brain through the pineal gland, the researchers collected a sample that confirmed the presence of DMT. That experiment resulted in a paper published in 2013.
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In this study, published today in Scientific Reports, Borjigin set out to discover how and where DMT was synthesized. Her graduate student, Jon Dean, lead author of the paper, set up an experiment using in situ hybridization. "With this technique, we found brain neurons with the two enzymes required to make DMT," says Borjigin. And they were not just in the pineal gland. They are also found in other parts of the brain, including the neocortex and hippocampus that are important for higher-order brain functions including learning and memory.
"We don't know what it's doing in the brain. All we're saying is we discovered the neurons that make this chemical in the brain, and they do so at levels similar to other monoamine neurotransmitters."
Image by Okan Caliskan from Pixabay