Scientific editorial.- Scientists from different centers American research they made it the biggest analysis of individual cells in the brain people with schizophreniaachieving a map of how genes known to increase the risk of suffering from this serious mental disorder, They affect specific brain cells.
Las Scientific journals, Science Translational Medicine and Science Advances published more than a dozen articles this Thursday from Consortium ‘PsychENCODE”, created in 2015 and dedicated to elucidating the molecular mechanisms underlying Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and autism spectrum disorder.
These goals are challenging due to, among other things, size and complexity human brain.
Since launch consortiumScientists have identified several hundred new risk genes for them mental disorders and revealed “critical” time windows during brain developmentin which these genes can influence the process more disease.
Several studies published today focus on schizophrenia. Researchers from McLean and Mount Sinai Hospital discovered new and “important” data about the molecular biology of the disorder.
Their research represents the largest single-cell analysis to date of the brains of people with schizophrenia and a population-scale map of brain regulatory components, the first of its kind to provide “basic insights” into brain pathogenesis. mental disorders according to the authors.
“We desperately need new paths of development treatment to schizophrenia and other serious mental illnesses,” he says Panos Roussos in a statement from Mount Sinai Hospital.
According to Roussos, “we now have technology and methodology necessary to delve deeper than ever into biology neuropsychiatric diseasesand we believe that with our latest research we have made significant progress in this area.”
These works reveal which types of cells express genes associated with the risk of schizophrenia differently, which biological functions are affected in these cells and which transcription factors – proteins, are involved in the regulation of schizophrenia. ADN– are important for these changes.
For a new study, teams performed a comprehensive single-cell analysis of transcriptomic changes—which genes are expressed in which cells—in the human prefrontal cortex, examining postmortem brain tissue from 140 individuals in two cohorts independent. Their analyzes included more than 468,000 cells.
Discover ‘unprecedented insights’ into the cellular basis of schizophrenia, linking genetic risk factors to populations neural specific.
Specifically, they saw that excitatory neurons emerged as the most affected cell group, with transcriptional changes that implied neurodevelopment and synapse-related pathways.
The authors note that these results could pave the way for targeted interventions and personalized treatments for schizophrenia, potentially improving clinical outcomes for affected individuals.
“This knowledge will allow future treatments to be tailored to specific genes and cell types, as well as individuals with schizophrenia,” McLean Hospital’s W. Brad Ruzicka points out in another note.
The researchers are now working to extend these findings to other areas of the brain and to the molecular impact of other psychiatric illnesses, such as bipolar disorder.
