Cellular and molecular mechanisms involved in the neurotoxicity of opioid and psychostimulant drugs

Substance abuse and addiction are the most costly of all the neuropsychiatric disorders. In the last decades, much progress has been achieved in understanding the effects of the drugs of abuse in the brain. However, efficient treatments that prevent relapse have not been developed. Drug addiction is now considered a brain disease, because the abuse of drugs affects several brain functions. Neurological impairments observed in drug addicts may reflect drug-induced neuronal dysfunction and neurotoxicity. The drugs of abuse directly or indirectly affect neurotransmitter systems, particularly dopaminergic and glutamatergic neurons. This review explores the literature reporting cellular and molecular alterations reflecting the cytotoxicity induced by amphetamines, cocaine and opiates in neuronal systems. The neurotoxic effects of drugs of abuse are often associated with oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, apoptosis and inhibition of neurogenesis, among other mechanisms. Understanding the mechanisms that underlie brain dysfunction observed in drug-addicted individuals may contribute to improve the treatment of drug addiction, which may have social and economic consequences.http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6SYS-4S50K2J-1/1/7d11c902193bfa3f1f57030572f7034

Oxidative addition of hydrogen halides and dihalogens to Pd. Trends in reactivity and relativistic effects

We have theoretically studied the oxidative addition of HX and

A new approach to chiral fermions on the lattice

We wish to describe a method for formulating, on the lattice, field theories that contain Dirac particles with chiral couplings to gauge fields. As is well-known, the most straight-forward lattice transcription of the continuum action for a Dirac particle leads to the doubling problem: for every particle of a given chirality in the continuum theory, there appear on the lattice, in d dimensions, 2{sup d} particles, with equal numbers of particles of left- and right-handed chirality. No-go theorems, state that it is impossible to eliminate the doubling problem and still maintain an exact chiral gauge symmetry. Rather than follow an approach that attempts to circumvent the no-go theorems we, instead, explore the possibility of abandoning exact chiral symmetry

A streamlined method for chiral fermions on the lattice

We discussed the use of renormalization counterterms to restore the chiral gauge symmetry in a lattice theory of Wilson fermions. We show that a large class of counterterms can be implemented automatically by making a simple modification to the fermion determinant