is usual to attribute the cause of mental illness to the environment, with some rare cases of genetic origin. The forefront of molecular pathology-science that seeks the ultimate causes of human disease, is breaking down that paradigm to show how the environment acts through the genes. Tokyo scientists reveal today that transposons, or jumping genes that change position in the genome ucélulas precursor of neurons, are a major cause of schizophrenia. Transposons variety generated during normal neuronal development. His excessive mobility may be due to hereditary causes, but also provoked by the environment, which may explain the current paradoxes about the genetics of mental illness.
Not that the genome of neurons go crazy, everything starts to go wrong and end up causing random schizophrenia. Mere errors can cause rare monogenic inherited diseases, or due to the mutation of a single gene, but the major human diseases such as cancer or mental disorder, have a much more subtle genetic components.
reason that schizophrenia is generated transposons are inserted near genes essential for the development and functioning of the brain. So not only alter their activity, but also how they respond to the environment. The regulation of genes depends precisely on the DNA sequences that have at hand, and the protagonist of this study transposon, called L1, contains specialized sequences to respond to the environment and regulating neighboring genes. That function is based during normal development, and in the genesis of schizophrenia.
Typical is attributed mental illness to the environment
Tadafumi Kato, Kazuya Iwamoto and colleagues at the Department of Molecular Psychiatry, University of Tokyo, in collaboration with other Japanese institutions, presented in
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