Neurons' faulty wiring leads to serotonin imbalance, depression-like behavior in mice
The findings were published in Science . "By pinpointing the genes that guide the organization of neurons, we can draw a line between changes to those genes, and the cellular, circuitry and behavioral deficiencies that can occur as a result," said Tom Maniatis, PhD, a principal investigator at Columbia's Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, the Isidore S. Edelman Professor and Chair of department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics at Columbia University Medical Center and the studys' senior author. Today's research is the result of parallel efforts by Dr. Maniatis, his lab and collaborators across Columbia to understand how individual neurons in the brain 'see' each other -- and how each of their hundreds, or even thousands, of branches wind through the brain without getting tangled up along the way. To investigate this problem, Dr. Maniatis and his team focused on a group of genes called clustered protocadherins , or Pcdh...