week 10 - disease and dendritic spines

Question 1

Learning objectives

Answer 1

• Evidence for synaptic dysfunction in neurodevelopmental and psychiatric conditions
• linking genetics with synaptic dysfunction
• stem cell models of synaptic dysfunction

Question 2

What are differences in dendritic spines and dendritic spine patholody in autism, rett syndrome and AD?

Name one caveat with these studys:

Answer 2

Read Kulkarni and Firestein (2012)

Read Fiala et al, 2012

-ASD shows more dendritic spines.
- SCZ shows to few dendritic spines

CAVEAT
- How do we distinguish between cause or consequence
- Especially because most of these studies are post-mortem

Question 3

evidence that synapses play a critical role in these diseases

Answer 3

• studies in disease genetics indicate a critical role for synapses
• lots of gene variants associated with these conditions occur in genes that code for synaptic proteins or are implicated in synaptic function
• Forrest et al, 2018