How do you make a two-year-old piece of neuroscience more news-y? With a dinosaur, of course.

A team of British neuroscientists has received a £1.1m to launch a follow up study on possible genetic factors in depression and anxiety disorders (University of Aberdeen press release). The research is focused on enhancer regions in the genome which are remarkably similar in humans, mice and chickens, suggesting that natural selection has kept them in shape for over 300 million years. This implies that dinosaurs had the same enhancers, and so led to an ingenious spin on the story by Craig Brown in The Scotsman

Dinosaurs were nervous rex

A GENETIC link between dinosaurs and humans could provide the key to developing a treatment for depression, according to Scots scientists.

Experts have discovered that the component in human DNA which triggers depression also existed in prehistoric beasts – and would have helped determine their moods.

Here’s the original article: Davidson et al, Molecular Psychiatry 11, 410–421(2006)

Posted on behalf of Tony Scully

Image: “Dinosaur Nights”, used under a Creative Commons licence from Flickr user Niznoz