A group led by graduate student Kalyani Karunakaran (at the time of the research) and principal investigator Kenichi Amemori at the Kyoto University Advanced Research Center for Human Biology (API-ASHBi) revealed the relationship between genes involved in anxiety disorders and the brain circuits in which those genes are expressed. I made it.
Anxiety disorders are a type of mental illness and include generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and panic disorder. Until now, genetic factors, such as inheritance in families, have been thought to be one of the causes, and genetic mutations that are frequently observed in people with anxiety disorders have also been identified, and genes related to anxiety disorders have been identified. It is being done.
At the same time, research using primates has revealed that the activity of specific neural circuits in the brain causes symptoms similar to anxiety disorders, and brain circuits involved in anxiety disorders are also being identified. The relationship between genetic factors of the disorder and brain circuits was unclear.
Therefore, this research group used statistical analysis to map where anxiety-related genes are expressed in the human brain, and discovered two groups of genes that exhibit characteristic expression. One gene group was highly expressed in the hippocampus and limbic system, and the other gene group was highly expressed in the midbrain and basal ganglia.
Furthermore, when we tracked the expression patterns of these two anxiety-related gene groups during brain development, we found that one gene group was highly expressed in late infancy and adulthood, and the other gene group was highly expressed in late pregnancy and early childhood. Different expression patterns were observed. Regarding involvement in signaling, one gene group was shown to be involved in glutamatergic receptor signaling in the hippocampus, and another gene group was suggested to be involved in serotonin cell signaling. Therefore, mutations in these anxiety-related genes may cause symptoms of anxiety disorders by interfering with their normal timing of expression or affecting the development of signaling and neural circuits.
In the future, it is hoped that further analysis of the gene clusters identified this time will provide new insights into elucidating the pathogenesis of anxiety disorders and developing treatments.
Paper information:[Translational Psychiatry] Spatiotemporal expression patterns of anxiety disorder-associated genes
