Local and general anaesthetics, large groups of drugs used worldwide, are of great importance in medicine, dentistry and veterinary medicine. Without them, most of the surgical procedures would be impossible and the rest extremely painful.

Many molecular effects of anaesthetics still remain to be elucidated.

Although budding yeast S. cerevisiae can difficultly be anaesthetised or even operated on, a systematic collection of more than 4000 single knockout strains will be used for analyzing the effects of anesthetics. Such technique is called chemical genomics and with it we will try to locate the specific genetic targets for tetracaine, lidocaine, etomidate and ketamine.

These results will enable us to draw further conclusions on their mechanism of action. In the last step, focused biochemical experiments conducted on mammalian cells will be needed in order to obtain medically relevant results.