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A New Study Reports that Oxytocin-mediated GABA Inhibition in Mouse Models of...
In a study published this month in the journal, Science, Tyzio et al. (2014) report some exciting findings which help fill in some of the gaps on oxytocin research in autism. Although in my own...
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The Prion Hypothesis: How Proteins May Create Heritable Memory
“How a genotype and its environment interact to yield a phenotype poses a vast epistemological gap. Proteins that exhibit conformational diversity and contingent functional multiplicity increase the...
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A Mutation that Lowers Risk for Schizophrenia?
Last month, Rees et al. (2014) reported that, in contrast to copy number variant (CNV) deletions at the genetic locus, 22q11, which increase schizophrenia risk, duplications in that same region appear...
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Is the Female Brain More Resilient against Harmful Mutations?
It has long been a topic of debate and discussion whether the lop-sided rates of autism diagnosis (males > females) reflects real gender variations in phenotype or simply diagnostic bias. Ozonoff et...
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Preliminary Data: Schizophrenia and Brain-related Genes May Have Higher...
We recently wrote and submitted a Letter to the Editor of Neuron in response to the recent article by Bundo et al. (2014) reporting increased LINE1 retrotransposition in schizophrenia genomes....
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“Why Are Some Genomes So F***ing Big???”
Good question. And it’s been asked before. Usually this question arises within the context of “What use is a larger genome?” when we consider vast genomes such as the onion compared to our own. Why...
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Your Skin Is More Important than You Thought It Was
Okay, so I think we all know what happens to this little goldfish when he jumps out of the fish tank and makes a mad dash for freedom. Aside from dying rapidly from oxygen deprivation, his skin...
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The “Race” to Discover Cortical Dysplasias in Autism
An article was published recently in The New England Journal of Medicine by Eric Courchesne’s group, investigating what is essentially evidence of dysplasia (underdevelopment due to prolonged...
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Nuclear Fusion & the Elements of Life
I hope you’ll all forgive this brief post today. I’ve been buried under insane levels of work for the last several weeks. However, as I was taking a short break this afternoon, lying on the couch, and...
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Cellular Appearances Can Be Deceiving…
For the past year I’ve been working on a project involving the development of hair. Some of our recent findings involve variations in function of a key protein, a type of early developmental...
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“For Every To, There Is a Fro”
Recently, blogger and trend-seeker-outer, Kas Thomas, reported on his blog, assertTrue( ), a very interesting finding regarding trends in complementary trinucleotides in protein coding genes of...
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Recent Publication in J.A.M.A. on the Familial Risk of Autism
Just this month an article was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association which assessed the familial risk of autism. This was a gigantic population based study on Swedish children...
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International Meeting for Autism Research (IMFAR) 2014
From left to right: Ami Klin, Laura Klinger, Francesca Happé, and Joe Piven. My fiancé, Manny Casanova, and I just finished attending this year’s International Meeting for Autism Research (IMFAR)...
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Translation Regulation in Autism: A Lesson from Fragile X
A few years ago, researchers reported that the Fragile X Mental Retardation (FMRP) pathway helps to regulate expression or activity of 93 genes linked with idiopathic autism [1, 2]. FMRP, within a...
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Is Epigenetic Inheritance Actually “Genetic”?
A new study published late last month in Genome Biology entitled, “Contribution of genetic variation to transgenerational inheritance of DNA methylation” reported on what has been a controversial topic...
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Development of the Corpus Callosum & Its Relationship to Autism
For those who are unfamiliar, the corpus callosum is a large bundle of communicative fibers that connects the two cerebral hemispheres, allowing crosstalk between them. Below are some DTI images...
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Animal Flowers & the Natural History of Science
I recently purchased a print off of eBay taken from the 1st American edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, printed in 1797. Having been brushing up on my natural history over the last year, the title...
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The University of Google – Armchair Science & Medicine
Sometimes, parents have to fight like tigers to advocate for their kids. I think we’ve all had unfortunate run-ins with healthcare professionals who have the bedside manner of a prickly pin cushion,...
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Dear United States Citizenry,
This is predominantly a blog about science; however, as we are all part of the human race, we all have the duty to speak up when we feel a group of people has been met with an injustice. Therefore, in...
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Sometimes You Can Tell a Book by its Cover: Shared Developments of the Brain...
Doctors and scientists have long been aware that certain craniofacial anomalies, especially those lying upon the midline of the face, i.e., eyes, nose, mouth, can often have a syndromic relationship...
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