BibTex format
@article{McConnell:2026:10.1038/s41398-026-04349-z,
author = {McConnell, PA and Raffety, J and Li, A and Steinberg, E and Rahim, S and Valtierra, C and Gazzaley, A and Carhart-Harris, RL and Pasquini, L},
doi = {10.1038/s41398-026-04349-z},
journal = {Translational Psychiatry},
title = {Cross-species mapping of acute psychedelic-responsive genes links HTR2A cortical expression, cell-type enrichment, and human cortical expression modules},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41398-026-04349-z},
year = {2026}
}
RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)
TY - JOUR
AB - <jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p> Psychedelic drugs exert rapid and profound effects on human consciousness [1–7] and are increasingly being investigated for their therapeutic potential [8–14]. Yet the transcriptional programs through which they may reshape brain function and structure remain incompletely understood, in part because the available evidence is heterogeneous and largely preclinical [15, 16]. In a structured scoping review of transcriptomic studies in animal models and neural cell cultures, we identified genes reported in the source literature to change within 3 h of classical psychedelic administration and intersected them with the Allen Human Brain Atlas to define an acute expression set. This retained set showed cortex-centered enrichment, a marker-based deep-layer projection-neuron component, and ontology enrichment for neuron projection and related synaptic terms. A smaller subset overlapped with human accelerated region-associated genes and showed greater-than-random spatial alignment with a human cortical-expansion map. The retained cortical-expression maps showed serotonergic spatial alignment in the human cortex, most prominently with <jats:italic>HTR2A</jats:italic> expression. Clustering identified three cortical spatial-expression modules, including an association/limbic-weighted module enriched for plasticity and synaptic-organization terms. Together, these findings provide a human cortical framework linking acute psychedelic-responsive transcription to cortical cell-type enrichment, <jats:italic>HTR2A</jats:italic> spatial expression, cortical spatial-expression modules, and cortical-expansion, while leaving receptor-specific, causal, translational, and cell-type-resolved mechanisms for future work. </jats:p>
AU - McConnell,PA
AU - Raffety,J
AU - Li,A
AU - Steinberg,E
AU - Rahim,S
AU - Valtierra,C
AU - Gazzaley,A
AU - Carhart-Harris,RL
AU - Pasquini,L
DO - 10.1038/s41398-026-04349-z
PY - 2026///
TI - Cross-species mapping of acute psychedelic-responsive genes links HTR2A cortical expression, cell-type enrichment, and human cortical expression modules
T2 - Translational Psychiatry
UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41398-026-04349-z
UR - https://doi.org/10.1038/s41398-026-04349-z
ER -
