Action Potential

Autism, synapses and mice – pairs division

Again, we’re behind on blogging – you guys are keeping us busy with great neuroscience – but here is the story of a pair of papers that appeared back to back in last week’s issue and a continuation of the discussion started here by Noah about the process of joint publication. The two papers by Tobias Boeckers and colleagues and by Eunjoon Kim and colleagues were independently submitted and both describe autism-like phenotypes of mice with mutations in the gene Shank2. In human studies, SHANK2 has been associated with rare cases of autism and these two mice add to the ever-growing list of rodents (according to SFARI.org, 17 rodent models debuted in 2011 alone) that are being created to investigate the functional consequences of genetic mutations linked to autism, in the hopes of understanding mechanisms underlying core symptoms. 

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