ArticleScientific reports2021
Radical pairs may play a role in xenon-induced general anesthesia.
Article in Scientific reports, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 62 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Evidence for a possible quantum effect on the formation of lithium-doped amorphous calcium phosphate from solution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The impact of ketamine and thiopental anesthesia on ultraweak photon emission and oxidative-nitrosative stress in rat brains.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2025Article
- Avian cryptochrome 4 binds superoxide.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2024Article
- Testing the Conjecture That Quantum Processes Create Conscious Experience.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
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- Magnetic isotope effects: a potential testing ground for quantum biology.Frontiers in physiology · 2023Article
- Photons guided by axons may enable backpropagation-based learning in the brain.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Radical triads, not pairs, may explain effects of hypomagnetic fields on neurogenesis.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Magnetic field effects in biology from the perspective of the radical pair mechanism.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Review
- Radical pairs may explain reactive oxygen species-mediated effects of hypomagnetic field on neurogenesis.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Radical pairs may play a role in microtubule reorganization.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Radical pairs can explain magnetic field and lithium effects on the circadian clock.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Towards Quantum-Chemical Modeling of the Activity of Anesthetic Compounds.International journal of molecular sciences · 2021Review
- Entangled radicals may explain lithium effects on hyperactivity.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Alzheimer's and Consciousness: How Much Subjectivity Is Objective?Neuroscience insights · 2021Article
- Xenon as a transdermal enhancer for niacinamide in Strat-M™ membranes.Medical gas researchArticle
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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.
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