Résumé
Serotonin (5-HT)(₂C) receptors play a major role in the regulation of mood, and alteration of their functional status has been implicated in the etiology of affect disorders. Correspondingly, they represent an important target for various antidepressant categories, including tricyclics, tetracyclics, mCPP derivatives, specific serotonin reuptake inhibitors, and agomelatine, which exhibit medium to high affinities for 5-HT(₂C) receptors and behave as antagonists. Antidepressant effects of 5-HT(₂C) antagonists have been attributed to a disinhibition of mesocorticolimbic dopaminergic pathways, which exert a beneficial influence upon mood and cognitive functions altered in depression. However, recent experimental evidence revealed a prominent role of constitutive activity in the tonic inhibitory control of dopaminergic transmission exerted by 5-HT(₂C) receptors in specific brain areas such as the nucleus accumbens. Accordingly, alteration in the constitutive activity of 5-HT(₂C) receptors might participate in the induction of depressed states and drugs with inverse agonist properties should themselves be effective antidepressant agents and, possibly, more active than neutral antagonists. This highlights the relevance of systematically evaluating inverse agonist versus neutral antagonist activities of antidepressants acting at 5-HT(₂C) receptors. Here, we provide a detailed description of a palette of cellular assays exploiting constitutive activity of 5-HT(₂C) receptor expressed in heterologous cells (such as HEK-293 cells) toward Gq-operated signaling or their constitutive association with β-arrestins to evaluate inverse agonist activity of antidepressants. We also describe an approach allowing discrimination between inverse agonist and neutral antagonist activities of antidepressants at native constitutively active receptors expressed in cultured cortical neurons, based on previous findings indicating that prolonged treatments with inverse agonists, but not with neutral antagonists, induce functional 5-HT(₂C) receptor-operated Ca²+ responses in neurons.