Abstract
Opioid abuse has become a major public health crisis that affects millions of individuals across the globe. This widespread abuse of prescription opioids and dramatic increase in the availability of illicit opioids have created what is known as the opioid epidemic. Pregnant women are a particularly vulnerable group since they are prescribed for opioids such as morphine, buprenorphine, and methadone, all of which have been shown to cross the placenta and potentially impact the developing fetus. Limited information exists regarding the effect of oxycodone (oxy) on synaptic alterations. To fill this knowledge gap, we employed an integrated system approach to identify proteomic signatures and pathways impacted on mixed neuroglial cultures treated with oxy for 24 h. Differentially expressed proteins were mapped onto global canonical pathways using ingenuity pathway analysis (IPA), identifying enriched pathways associated with ephrin signaling, semaphorin signaling, synaptic long-term depression, endocannabinoid signaling, and opioid signaling. Further analysis by ClueGO identified that the dominant category of differentially expressed protein functions was associated with GDP binding. Since opioid receptors are G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs), these data indicate that oxy exposure perturbs key pathways associated with synaptic function.