Research Article The Neuroprotective Role of Origanum syriacum L. and Lavandula dentata L. Essential Oils through Their Effects on AMPA Receptors Mohammad Qneibi , 1 Nidal Jaradat , 2 Mohammed Hawash, 2 Abdel Naser Zaid, 2 Abdel-Razzak Natsheh, 3 Remah Yousef, 1 and Qais AbuHasan 1 1 Department of Biomedical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, An-Najah National University, Nablus, State of Palestine 2 Department of Pharmacy, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, An-Najah National University, Nablus, State of Palestine 3 Department of Computer Information Systems, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, An-Najah National University, Nablus, State of Palestine Correspondence should be addressed to Mohammad Qneibi; mqneibi@najah.edu Received 27 October 2018; Revised 8 February 2019; Accepted 24 February 2019; Published 11 March 2019 Academic Editor: Mauro S. Oliveira Copyright © 2019 Mohammad Qneibi et al. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Lavandula dentata L. and Origanum syriacum L. essential oils have numerous health benefts and properties, such as possessing common components with a variant degree of depressive actions in the central nervous system. We investigated the depressive property of these oils on AMPA receptors, which are responsible for most of the fast-excitatory neurotransmission in the CNS and play a critical role in synaptic plasticity. Since excessive activation of AMPARs has been linked to neurotoxicity leading to various pathologies, we hypothesize that these oils have a neuroprotective role by acting directly on the kinetics of AMPARs. Using Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GC/MS) and patch-clamp electrophysiology, the essential oils of L. dentata fowers and O. syriacum leaves were characterized and the whole cell currents were measured with and without the administration of the oils onto HEK293 cells. Te current study results showed that the biophysical properties of AMPA receptor subunits showed a decrease in desensitization rate of GluA1 and GluA2 homomers, using O. syriacum, while administering L. dentata oil decreased the desensitization rate of GluA1 and GluA2 homomers, as well as GluA1/2 heteromers. As for the deactivation rate, both oils slowed the deactivation kinetics of all AMPA receptor subunits. Intriguingly, between the two oils, the efect of desensitization and deactivation was of a greater signifcance for L. dentata oil than O. syriacum. Our data suggest that the two oils contain components that are essential to identify, as those active components underlie the oils’ neuronal depressive properties reported, and to extract them to synthesize a potent neuroprotective drug to treat neurological diseases potentially. 1. Introduction Many neurological disorders have a chronic pattern and could be very debilitating for the patients. Te most common cause of dementia is Alzheimer’s disease (AD), which is characterized by progressive neurodegeneration leading to memory loss and cognitive impairment, ending in person- ality loss, social disinhibition, and death [1]. Epilepsy is a disorder of the synchronized activity of neurons, resulting in a recurrent, unprovoked episode of seizures [2]. Amy- otrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is a fatal neurodegenerative disease that manifests as selective loss of motor neurons in the multiple areas of the nervous system including the brainstem, motor cortex, and spinal cord [3–5]. Moreover, cerebral ischemia, mostly caused by strokes, is one of the most common pathologies that lead to many potentially irreversible neurological defcits [6]. Tese are a few examples of the many neurological diseases that have all been linked to glutamate toxicity [7]. Glutamate is the primary excitatory neurotransmitter in the mammalian central nervous system (CNS) [8]. Glutamate receptors are classifed into metabotropic (mGluRs) and Hindawi BioMed Research International Volume 2019, Article ID 5640173, 11 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2019/5640173