Having a Bad Trip? – Your DNA May Explain How You Are Going to React to Psychedelics

But they also found that psychedelics as well as SSRI’s don’t have the same results in everyone – and genes could explain why. The researchers identified the primary receptor that psychedelics bind to in the human body: 5-HT2A which shares an almost identical chemical structure to serotonin. They also found that the gene variants they analyzed reflected mutations in a genome known as the single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP); the mutations were 7 alleles that are found in the biology of most human beings, explains Gavin Schmitz, first author of the paper.