Autism can bestow brilliance as well as cognitive difficulty, but how either scenario plays out in the brain is not clear. Now a study by University of Toronto researchers has found that a tiny gene fragment impacts the brain in a way that could explain swathes of autism cases that come with mental disability.
Researchers led by Benjamin Blencowe, a professor of molecular genetics in the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, and Sabine Cordes, a senior investigator at Sinai Health System’s Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute (LTRI), have identified a short gene segment that is crucial for brain development and information processing. Writing in the journal Molecular Cell, the researchers describe how an absence of this segment is sufficient to induce altered social behaviour–a hallmark of autism–in mice, as well as learning and memory deficits, which are seen in a subset of autism cases.
