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Note to media: Photos of autistic mice before and after grooming are available from the journal Nature, by e-mail request to press@nature.com.
Newswise Aha moments are rare in medical research, scientists say. As rare, they add, as finding mice with Mohawk-like hairstyles.
But both events happened in a lab at NYU Langone Medical Center, months after an international team of neuroscientists bred hundreds of mice with a suspect genetic mutation tied to autism spectrum disorders.
Almost all the grown mice, the NYU Langone team observed, had sideways,overgroomed hair with a highly stylized center hairline between their ears and hardly a tuft elsewhere. Mice typically groom each others hair.
Researchers say they knew instantly they were on to something, as the telltale overgrooming a repetitive motor behavior had been linked in other experiments in mice to the brain condition that prevents children from developing normal social, behavioral, cognitive, and motor skills. People with autism, the researchers point out, exhibit noticeably dysfunctional behaviors, such as withdrawal, and stereotypical, repetitive movements, including constant hand-flapping, or rocking.
Now and for what NYU Langone researchers believe to be the first time, an autistic motor behavior has been traced to specific biological pathways that are genetically determined.
The findings, says senior study investigator Gordon Fishell, PhD, the Julius Raynes Professor of Neuroscience and Physiology at NYU Langone, could with additional testing in humans lead to new treatments for some autism, assuming the pathways effects as seen in mice are reversible.
In the study, to be published in the journal Nature online May 25, researchers knocked out production in mice of a protein called Cntnap4. This protein had been found in earlier studies in specialized brain cells, known as interneurons, in people with a history of autism.
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Mice With "Mohawks" Help Scientists Link Autism to Two Biological Pathways in Brain