Wiring the Brain

There is a paradox at the heart of behavioural and psychiatric genetics. On the one hand, it is very clear that practically any psychological trait one cares to study is partly heritable - i.e., the differences in the trait between people are partly caused by differences in their genes. Similarly, psychiatric disorders are also highly heritable and, by now, mutations in hundreds of different genes have been identified that cause them. However, these studies also highlight the limits of genetic determinism, which is especially evident in comparisons of monozygotic (identical) twins, who share all their genetic inheritance in common. Though they are obviously much more like each other in psychological traits than people who are not related to each other, they are clearly NOT identical to each other for these traits. For example, if one twin has a diagnosis of schizophrenia, the chance that the other one will also suffer from the disorder is about 50% - massively higher than the pop...

Recent evidence indicates that psychiatric disorders can arise from differences, literally, in how the brain is wired during development. Psychiatric genetic approaches are finding new mutations associated with mental illness at an amazing rate, thanks to new genomic array and sequencing technologies. These mutations include so-called copy number variants (deletions or duplications of sections of a chromosome) or point mutations (a change in the code at one position of the DNA sequence). At the recent Wiring the Brain conference , we heard from Christopher Walsh, Guy Rouleau, Michael Gill and others of the identification of a number of new genes associated with neurological disorders, epilepsy, autism and schizophrenia. The emerging picture is that each of these disorders can be caused by mutations in any one of a large number of genes. Strikingly, many of these genes play important roles in neural development, with mutations affecting patterns of cell migration, the guidance of g...