Teen gene link in schizophrenia?

• Autores: Clare Wilson
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3058, 2016, pág. 12
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Molecular biologist Steven McCarroll's latest work offers tantalizing clues about the cause of schizophrenia, which is poorly understood and can affect people for life. It suggests schizophrenia can result from a normal stage of teenage brain maturation gone wrong. The work builds on a recent landmark study that pointed to 108 regions of the DNA in which certain variants can raise the risk of schizophrenia. The one most strongly implicated is a large region of the genome that encodes proteins involved in the immune system, on the face of it a puzzling find for a brain disorder. McCarroll's team has now found that people with the risky variants of this region have higher levels of a molecule called complement component 4. In the blood, C4 binds to microbes to signal that they should be eaten by immune cells. By genetically engineering mice that lack C4, the team showed it has a second role--in the brain. Here C4 binds to neurons at the points where they connect with other neurons, and signals that these connections, or synapses, should also be engulfed by immune cells.