Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Another Link Between Dog Brains And Our Brains

I got a surprising email yesterday from Pat Levitt, the director of the Program in Developmental Neurogenetics of the Institute for the Developing Mind at the Keck School of Medicine of USC in Los Angeles. Although Levitt wasn’t involved in the dog research, it hit home for him. This table is the reason why. It lists a dozen genes that experienced strong selection in both dogs and humans. Two of those genes have been shown to be involved in the brain, four in digestion, and six in the cell cycle. (When those last six mutate, they can cause cancer.)

There’s a mistake on that list–but a mistake of the good kind. One of the six cancer genes is called MET. “However,” Levitt wrote to me, “in 2006, my laboratory published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science on a mutation in the MET gene that increases risk for autism.” (Here’s the paper.) In fact, a variant of the MET gene is now recognized as one of the strongest genetic risks for autism.

Levitt and his colleagues have continued to study the gene to understand how it plays a role in autism. My fellow Phenomena blogger Virginia Hughes wrote last year about how Levitt and his colleagues discovered that it shapes the wiring connections between neurons. Not just any neurons, however. It’s most active in circuits in the brain that are involved in social and emotional behavior.

“I don’t believe it is a coincidence that both the serotonin transporter and MET are on the list,” says Levitt.


- More Here from Carl Zimmer




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