Developmental Syngap1 Haploinsufficiency in Medial Ganglionic Eminence-Derived Interneurons Impairs Auditory Cortex Activity, Social Behavior, and Extinction of Fear Memory

Description

A team of neuroscientists asks what one gene does inside the brain's inhibitory cells. Faults in SYNGAP1 cause intellectual disability with epilepsy and autism traits, but most work had focused on excitatory neurons. The team lowered the gene's dose only in interneurons born in one embryonic zone, then narrowed it further to two cell families, and recorded brain activity and behavior in the mice.

Mice with the early, broad reduction showed abnormal cortical rhythms and an oversized response to a forty-hertz sound. They also could not adapt to repeated sounds, a flaw traced to one cell family but not the other. Social behavior suffered, and the mice could not unlearn a fear memory. Narrower reductions spared those behaviors. The authors infer that timing and cell type decide which symptoms appear, and that early-born interneurons are a likely source of the cortical and social problems.

Catalog record

Source: https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC11622180