Looking at autism through the fruit fly
The characteristics, interactions and roles of autism-associated genes in the fruit flies’ brain will help guide how we think about the same genes in humans, says Ralph Greenspan.
The characteristics, interactions and roles of autism-associated genes in the fruit flies’ brain will help guide how we think about the same genes in humans, says Ralph Greenspan.
A new website invites the public to help map the ‘connectome,’ the pattern of connections among all the neurons in our brain.
Structural connections in the brain’s face-processing region can be used to predict brain activity in response to faces, according to research published this month in Nature Neuroscience.
An automated instrument can reconstruct fluorescently labeled mouse brains in less than a day, researchers reported 15 January in Nature Methods.
Analyzing the organization of whole-brain structural networks could reveal differences in the way brains of children with autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders are wired.
Head movements taint the results of many brain imaging studies, particularly those analyzing children or individuals with developmental disorders, according to two sobering new studies.
Male rhesus macaques show more interest in videos with social content, such as another monkey displaying aggression, than in videos of landscapes or other animals, according to a study published 26 October in PLoS One.
A mouse model of Rett syndrome that mimics a mutation seen in people shows many features of the disorder, such as hand clasping, according to a study published 27 November in Nature Neuroscience.
Studying the cellular and molecular mechanisms that underlie autism is crucial to advancing our understanding of the disorder, says neuroscientist Eric Kandel.
Neurons from mice that model fragile X syndrome may fire signals more readily than neurons from controls, according to a study published 5 October in The Journal of Neuroscience. The results suggest a cause for the high incidence of seizures in individuals with the syndrome.