DSAC symposium

Every year the Student Council for the Life Science's division of the grad school puts on a student research symposium. There are talks and a poster session. Everyone takes a poster from a conference that they have attended and show off what cool things they have been doing. I went to two of the talk sessions and gave my poster from Italy again. It was good to notice how much progress I have made since the summer.
By far the best talk that I saw was one about the therapeutic effects of MDMA (ecstasy). MDMA is best known for its recreational psychoactive properties and for the accompanying detrimental effects like neuronal death leading to memory problems. In some serious cases MDMA has been used to treat PTSD, autism, and a few other psychological disorders. Because of the ecstasy effects of MDMA patients experience improvements in the symptoms that prompted the prescription but they are still affected by all the negative effects. The student's talk focused on his research on a particular conformation of MDMA that seems to elicit the desired prosocial responses but does not induce neurodegeneration or some of the habit forming behaviors. MDMA is a chiral chemical which means that the exact same atoms, in the same order, attached to the same things, make different shapes. One shape was thought to have all the activity, because in the 70's when scientists were testing the two shapes, one shape made them feel "ecstasy" and the other one didn't.   This student is showing that the other shape has similar therapeutic activity but much lower toxicity. In addition to being good for psychological disorders this could be good as an addition treatment. Pretty cool.