The findings may one day pave the way for scientists to design treatments that allow these phases of brain development to proceed unimpaired
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“What’s really cool about this paper is that autism is a collection of different behaviours, but we don’t have understanding of how those behaviours are connected to differences in the brain,” said James McPartland, a professor of child psychiatry and psychology at the Yale School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study.
Often, scientists can instead learn the role an individual gene plays by observing what happens when that gene is knocked out of cells in a lab dish. But knocking out 425 genes one by one is time-consuming.For their study, Pasca and his colleagues used a technique they developed six years ago that allowed them to test all 425 genes at once. They engineered the cells so that only those nerve cells that inhibit others from firing would cast a green glow.
This was all the more remarkable because in living brains, the region of the subpallium that makes interneurons is not right next to the cerebral cortex, but is inches away, Pasca said. Using the fused clumps of cells, the researchers “performed by far the largest screen for autism and genes,” Guo-li Ming, a professor in the departments of neuroscience and psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in an email commenting on the study.
And genes alone cannot account for autism, said Yale’s McPartland. “It’s complicated, and it’s fascinating. You can have identical twins and they almost always will both have autism. But not always.”
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