brain development

(Clemson University) The National Science Foundation has awarded $356,000 to Cindy Lee, environmental chemist and a professor of environmental engineering and earth sciences at Clemson University, to look at how pollutants cycle through fish and other organisms and wind up on the dinner table.

The research will focus on PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), pollutants that have been implicated in problems with brain development in humans.

Science study: Gene defects linked to autism stop the brain from growing in response to learning -- pointing to a target for new autism treatments.

(Research Australia) Australian scientists have shown that mental and physical exercise can improve coordination and movement problems in Rett syndrome, a devastating genetic brain development disorder that primarily affects females.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) that strikes during childhood may disrupt a key phase of brain development and appears to have a profound negative impact on a child's ability to think and pay attention.

(Centre for Addiction and Mental Health) The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health has discovered a new form of intellectual disability involving mental retardation along with the eye defect retinitis pigmentosa.

CAMH also discovered the previously unidentified gene that causes this disorder, CC2D2A. This scientific advance will help understand the developmental and biological processes involved in brain development, and may help identify ways to diagnose and treat intellectual disabilities.

Scientists at Children's Hospital & Research Center Oakland ask whether there is convincing biological or behavioral evidence linking vitamin D deficiency to brain dysfunction and concluded that there is ample biological evidence to suggest an important role for vitamin D in brain development and function, and that supplementation for groups chronically low in vitamin D is warranted.

Patients with schizophrenia are three to four times as likely as healthy people to harbor large mutations in genes that control brain development, and many of those glitches are unique to each patient, researchers reported yesterday.

People with schizophrenia have high rates of rare genetic deletions and duplications that likely disrupt the developing brain.

These anomalies were found in 15 percent of adult onset schizophrenia patients and 20 percent of child and adolescent onset patients, compared with only 5 percent of healthy participants.

Collectively, the mutations carried by patients were significantly more likely than those in healthy participants to disrupt genes involved in brain development -- potentially implicating hundreds of genes.

A team of researchers at the University of Washington and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories has uncovered genetic errors that may shed light on the causes of schizophrenia.

The scientists found that deletions and duplications of DNA are more common in people with the mental disorder, and that many of those errors occur in genes related to brain development and neurological function.

In the earliest days of brain development, the brain's first cells - neuroepithelial stem cells -- divide continuously, producing a population of cells that eventually evolves into the various cells of the fully formed brain.

Now, UCSF scientists have identified a gene that, in mice, is critical for these stem cells to divide correctly.

Without it, they fail to divide, and die.