Psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline cause severe and often long-lasting hallucinations, but they also show great potential in treating a number of serious psychiatric conditions, such as major depressive disorder. The results of new research headed by scientists at the University of California at Chapel Hill School of Medicine, and Stanford University School of Medicine, have now for the first time solved the high-resolution structure of these psychedelic compounds when they are actively bound to the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor (HTR2A) on the surface of brain cells.
