According to the authors of  “Protective effect of CRHR1 gene variants on the development of adult depression following childhood maltreatment: replication and extension“  [PMID: 19736354], theirs is “the first instance of Genes x Environment research that stress has been ascertained by more than 1 study using the same instrument“.  The gene they speak of is the Corticotropin-releasing hormone receptor 1 (CRHR1) gene (SNPs rs7209436, rs110402, rs242924 which can form a so-called T-A-T haplotype which has been associated with protection from early life stress (as ascertained using the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire CTQ)).

The research team examined several populations of adults and, like many other studies, found that early life stress was associated with symptoms of depressive illness but, like only 1 previous study, found that the more T-A-T haplotypes a person has (0,1,or 2) the less likely they were to suffer these symptoms.

Indeed, the CRHR1 gene is an important player in a complex network of hormonal signals that regulate the way the body (specifically the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis) transduces the effects of stress.  So it seems quite reasonable to see that individual differences in ones ability to cope with stress might correlate with genotype here.   The replication seems like a major step forward in the ongoing paradigm shift from “genes as independent risk factors” to “genetic risk factors being dependent on certain environmental forces”.  The authors suggest that a the protective T-A-T haplotype might play a role in the consolidation of emotional memories and that CRHR1 T-A-T carriers might have a somewhat less-efficient emotional memory consolidation (sort of preventing disturbing memories from making it into long-term storage in the first place?) – which is a very intriguing and testable hypothesis.

On a more speculative note … consider the way in which the stress responsivity of a developing child is tied to its mother’s own stress responsivity.  Mom’s own secretion of CRH from the placenta is known to regulate gestational duration and thus the size, heartiness and stress responsiveness of her newborn.  The genetic variations are just passed along from generation to generation and provide some protection here and there in an intertwined cycle of life.

The flowers think they gave birth to seeds,
The shoots, they gave birth to the flowers,
And the plants, they gave birth to the shoots,
So do the seeds they gave birth to plants.
You think you gave birth to the child.
None thinks they are only entrances
For the life force that passes through.
A life is not born, it passes through.

anees akbar

It sounds simple on paper – just collect lots of folks with disorder X and look at their genomes in reference to a demographically matched healthy control population.  Voila! whatever is different is a candidate for genetic risk.  Apparently, not so.

The missing heritability problem that clouds the birth of the personal genomes era refers to the baffling inability to find enough common genetic variants that can account for the genetic risk of an illness or disorder.

There are any number of reasons for this … (i) even as any given MZ and DZ twin pair shares genetic variants that predispose them toward the similar brains and mental states, it may be the case that different MZ and DZ pairs have different types of rare genetic variation thus diluting out any similar patterns of variation when large pools of cases and controls are compared …  (ii) also, the way that the environment interacts with common risk-promoting genetic variation may be quite different from person to person – making it hard to find variation that is similarly risk-promoting in large pools of cases and controls … and many others I’m sure.

One research group recently asked whether the type of common genetic variation(SNP vs. CNV) might inform the search for the missing heritability.  The authors of the recent paper, “Genome-wide association study of CNVs in 16,000 cases of eight common diseases and 3,000 shared controls” [doi:10.1038/nature08979] looked at an alternative to the usual SNP markers – so called common copy number variants (CNVs) – and asked if these markers might provide a stronger accounting for genetic risk.  While a number of previous papers in the mental health field have indeed shown associations with CNVs, this massive study (some 3,432 CNV probes in 2000 or so cases and 3000 controls) did not reveal an association with bipolar disorder.  Furthermore, the team reports that common CNV variants are already in fairly strong linkage disequilibrium with common SNPs and so perhaps may not have reached any farther into the abyss of rare genetic variation than previous GWAS studies.

Disappointing perhaps, but a big step forward nonetheless!  What will the personal genomes era look like if we all have different forms of rare genetic variation?

Obviously, Wolfe was a gifted artist, despite whatever psychiatric diagnosis was suggested at the time.  Nevertheless, clinical psychiatrists might be quick to point out that such work reflects the presence of an underlying thought disorder (loss of abstraction ability, tangentiality, loose associations, derailment, thought blocking, overinclusive thinking, etc., etc.) – despite the undeniable aesthetic beauty in the work.  As an ardent fan of such art,  it made me wonder just how “well ordered” my own thoughts might be.  Given to being rather forgetful and distractable, I suspect my thinking process is just sufficiently well ordered to perform the routine tasks of day-to-day living, but perhaps not a whole lot more so.  Is this bad or good?  Who knows.

However, Krug et al., in their recent paper, “The effect of Neuregulin 1 on neural correlates of episodic memory encoding and retrieval” [doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2009.12.062] do note that the brains of unaffected relatives of persons with mental illness show subtle differences in various patterns of activation.  It seems that when individuals are using their brains to encode information for memory storage, unaffected relatives show greater activation in areas of the frontal cortex compared to unrelated subjects.  This so-called encoding process during episodic memory is very important for a healthy memory system and its dysfunction is correlated with thought disorders and other aspects of cognitive dysfunction.  Krug et al., proceed to explore this encoding process further and ask if a well-known schizophrenia risk variant (rs35753505 C vs. T) in the neuregulin-1 gene might underlie this phenomenon.  To do this, they asked 34 TT, 32 TC and 28 CC individuals to perform a memory (of faces) game whilst laying in an MRI scanner.

The team reports that there were indeed differences in brain activity during both the encoding (storage) and retrieval (recall) portions of the task – that were both correlated with genotype – and also in which the CC risk genotype was correlated with more (hyper-) activation.  Some of the brain areas that were hyperactivated during encoding and associated with CC genotype were the left middle frontal gyrus (BA 9), the bilateral fusiform gyrus and the left middle occipital gyrus (BA 19).  The left middle occipital gyrus showed gene associated-hyperactivation during recall.  So it seems, that healthy individuals can carry risk for mental illness and that their brains may actually function slightly differently.

As an ardent fan of Art Brut, I confess I hoped I would carry the CC genotype, but alas, my 23andme profile shows a boring TT genotype.  No wonder my artwork sucks.  More on NRG1 here.

** PODCAST accompanies this post**

I have a little boy who loves to run and jump and scream and shout – a lot.  And by this, I mean running – at full speed and smashing his head into my gut,  jumping – off the couch onto my head,  screaming – spontaneous curses and R-rated body parts and bodily functions.  I hope you get the idea.  Is this normal? or (as I oft imagine) will I soon be sitting across the desk from a school psychologist pitching me the merits of an ADHD diagnosis and medication?

Of course, when it comes to behavior, there is not a distinct line one can cross from normal to abnormal.  Human behavior is complex, multi-dimensional and greatly interpreted through the lens of culture.  Our present culture is highly saturated by mass-marketing, making it easy to distort a person’s sense of “what’s normal” and create demand for consumer products that folks don’t really need (eg. psychiatric diagnoses? medications?).   Anyhow, its tough to know what’s normal.  This is an important issue to consider for those (mass-marketing hucksters?) who might be inclined to promote genetic data as “hard evidence” for illness, disorder or abnormality of some sort.

With this in mind, I really enjoyed a recent paper by Stollstorff et al., “Neural response to working memory load varies by dopamine transporter genotype in children” [doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2009.12.104] who asked how the brains of healthy children functioned, even though they carry a genotype that has been widely associated with the risk of ADHD.  Healthy children who carry genetic risk for ADHD. Hmm, might this be my boy?

The researchers looked at a 9- vs. 10-repeat VNTR polymorphism in the 3′-UTR of the dopamine transporter gene (DAT1).  This gene – which encodes the very protein that is targeted by so many ADHD medications – influences the re-uptake of dopamine from the synaptic cleft.  In the case of 10/10 genotypes, it seems that DAT1 is more highly expressed, thus leading to more re-uptake and hence less dopamine in the synaptic cleft.  Generally, dopamine is needed to enhance the signal/noise of neurotransmission, so – at the end of the day – the 10/10 genotype is considered less optimal than the 9/9-repeat genotype.  As noted by the researchers, the ADHD literature shows that the 10-repeat allele, not the 9-repeat, is most often associated with ADHD.

The research team asked these healthy children (typically developing children between 7 and 12 years of age) to perform a so-called N-back task which requires that children remember words that are presented to them one-at-a-time.  Each time a new word is presented, the children had to decide whether that word was the same as the previous word (1-back) or the previous, previous word (2-back).  Its a maddening task and places an extreme demand on neural circuits involved in active maintenance of information (frontal cortex) as well as inhibition of irrelevant information that occurs during updating (basal ganglia circuits).

As the DAT1 protein is widely expressed in the basal ganglia, the research team asked where in the brain was variation in the DAT1 (9- vs. 10-repeat) associated with neural activity?  and where was there a further difference between 1-back and 2-back?  Indeed, the team finds that brain activity in many regions of the basal ganglia (caudate, putamen, substantia nigra & subthalamic nucleus) were associated with genetic variation in DAT1.  Neat!  the gene may be exerting an influence on brain function (and behavior) in healthy children, even though they do not carry a diagnosis.  Certainly, genes are not destiny, even though they do influence brain and behavior.

What was cooler to me though, is the way the investigators examined the role of genetic variation in the 1-back (easy or low load condition) vs. 2-back (harder, high-load condition) tasks.  Their data shows that there was less of an effect of genotype on brain activation in the easy tasks.  Rather, only when the task was hard, did it become clear that the basal ganglia in the 10/10 carriers was lacking the necessary brain activation needed to perform the more difficult task.  Thus, the investigators reveal that the genetic risk may not be immediately apparent under conditions where heavy “loads” or demands are not placed on the brain.  Cognitive load matters when interpreting genetic data!

This result made me think that genes in the brain might be a lot like genes in muscles.  Individual differences in muscle strength are not associated with genotype when kids are lifting feathers.  Only when kids are actually training and using their muscles, might one start to see that some genetically advantaged kids have muscles that strengthen faster than others.  Does this mean there is a “weak muscle gene” – yes, perhaps.  But with the proper training regimen, children carrying such a “weak muscle gene” would be able to gain plenty of strength.

I guess its off to the mental and physical gyms for me and my son.

** PODCAST accompanies this post** also, here’s a link to the Vaidya lab!

The A-to-T SNP rs7794745 in the CNTNAP2 gene was found to be associated with increased risk of autism (see Arking et al., 2008).  Specifically, the TT genotype, found in about 15% of individuals, increases these folks’ risk by about 1.2-1.7-fold.  Sure enough, when I checked my 23andMe profile, I found that I’m one of these TT risk-bearing individuals.  Interesting, although not alarming since me and my kids are beyond the age where one typically worries about autism.  Still, one can wonder if such a risk factor might have exerted some influence on the development of my brain?

The recent paper by Tan et al., “Normal variation in fronto-occipital circuitry and cerebellar structure with an autism-associated polymorphism of CNTNAP2” [doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.02.018 ] suggests there may be subtle, but still profound influences of the TT genotype on brain development in healthy individuals.  According to the authors, “homozygotes for the risk allele showed significant reductions in grey and white matter volume and fractional anisotropy in several regions that have already been implicated in ASD, including the cerebellum, fusiform gyrus, occipital and frontal cortices. Male homozygotes for the risk alleles showed greater reductions in grey matter in the right frontal pole and in FA in the right rostral fronto-occipital fasciculus compared to their female counterparts who showed greater reductions in FA of the anterior thalamic radiation.”

The FA (fractional anisotropy – a measurement of white-matter or myelination) results are consistent with a role of CNTNAP2 in the establishment of synaptic contacts and other cell-cell contacts especially at Nodes of Ranvier – which are critical for proper function of white-matter tracts that support rapid, long-range neural transmission.  Indeed, more severe mutations in CNTNAP2  have been associated with cortical dysplasia and focal epilepsy (Strauss et al., 2006).

Subtle changes perhaps influencing long-range information flow in my brain – wow!

More on CNTNAP2 … its evolutionary history and role in language development.

Here’s a great paper, “Association between ADORA2A and DRD2 Polymorphisms and Caffeine-Induced Anxiety” [doi: 10.1038/npp.2008.17] wherein polymorphisms in the adenosine A2A receptor (ADORA2A encodes the protein that caffeine binds to and antagonizes) – as well as the dopamine D2 receptor (DRD2 encodes a protein whose downstream signals are normally counteracted by A2A receptors) — show associations with anxiety after the consumption of 150mg of caffeine (about an average cup of coffee – much less than the super-size, super-rich cups that Starbucks sells).  The variants, rs5751876 (T-allele), rs2298383 (T-allele) and rs4822492 (G-allele) from the ADORA2A gene as well as rs1110976 (-/G genotype) from the DRD2 gene showed significant increases in anxiety in a test population of 102 otherwise-healthy light-moderate regular coffee drinkers.

My own 23andMe data only provides a drop of information suggesting I’m protected from the anxiety-promoting effects.  Nevertheless, I’ll avoid the super-sizes.
rs5751876 (T-allele)  C/C – less anxiety
rs2298383 (T-allele) – not covered
rs4822492 (G-allele) – not covered
rs1110976 (-/G genotype) – not covered

Walter Dean Myers, an author of The Young Landlords and many other classic coming of age novels once remarked, “The special place of the young adult novel should be in its ability to address the needs of the reader to understand his or her relationships with the world, with each other, and with adults.“  Indeed, the wonderful elaborations of psychosocial development that occur during the teenage years makes for a vivid and tumultuous time – worthy of many a book – especially those like Myers’ that so help adolescents to cope.  During this time, a child’s brain and body is supplanted by adult systems, which, from a physiological point of view, place the adolescent’s mind and body at the mercy of thousands of shifting biochemical processes.  Such a notion of the shifting sands of adolescence were brought to mind while reading a research article focused on one – just one single example – of biochemical change.

The paper entitled, “Cortico-striatal synaptic defects and OCD-like behaviors in SAPAP3 mutant mice” [doi: 10.1038/nature06104] points out that mice who lack the function of the post-synaptic density scaffolding protein encoded by the SAPAP3 gene display excessive grooming and other behaviors reminiscent of obsessive compulsive disorder – a condition that frequently emerges during adolescence.  One of the main findings of the paper is that a normal developmental shift of NR2B –> NR2A subunits of the NMDA receptor does NOT seem to occur – rendering the SAPAP3 mutant mice with an immature form of NMDA receptor.  The authors suggest that this may be the underlying reason for the aberrant behavior, and were able to normalize the mutant mice by re-introducing SAPAP3 protein via a lentiviral-mediated expression vector placed in the striatum.

Gosh.  This NR2B –> NR2A shift is just one example – one grain – in the shifting biochemical sands of development.  Just one of thousands.  How did my brain ever make it through?

If you have a minute, check out this “Autism Sensory Overload Simulation” video to get a feel for the perceptual difficulties experienced by people with autism spectrum disorders.  A recent article, “Critical Period Plasticity Is Disrupted in the Barrel Cortex of Fmr1 Knockout Mice” [doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2010.01.024] provides some clues to the cellular mechanisms that are involved in this phenomenon.  The authors examined the developing somatosensory cortex in lab mice who carry a mutation in a gene called FMR1.  The normal function of this gene is to help synapses mature and optimize their strength through a process known as activity-dependent plasticity.  This a kind of “use-it-or-lose-it” neural activity that is important when you are practicing and practicing to learn something new – say, like riding a bike, or learning a new language.  Improvements in performance that come from “using” the circuits in the brain are correlated with optimized synaptic connections – via a complex set of biochemical reactions (eg. AMPA receptor trafficking).

When FMR1 is not functioning, neuronal connections (in this case, synapses that connect the thalamus to the somatosensory cortex) cannot mature and develop properly.  This wreaks havoc in the developing brain where maturation can occur in successive critical periods – where the maturation of one circuit is needed to ensure the subsequent development of another.  Hence, the authors suggest, the type of sensory overload reported in the autism spectrum disorders may be related to a similar type of developmental anomaly in the somatosensory cortex.

For a great many reasons, research on mental illness is focused on the frontal cortex.  Its just a small part of the brain, and certainly, many things can go wrong in other places during brain/cognitive development, but, it remains a robust finding, that when the frontal cortex is not working well, individuals have difficulties in regulating thoughts and emotions.  Life is difficult enough to manage, let alone without a well functioning frontal cortex.  So its no surprise that many laboratories look very closely at how this region develops prenatally and during childhood.

One of the more powerful genetic methods is the analysis of gene expression via microarrays (here is a link to a tutorial on this technology).  When this technology is coupled with extremely careful histological analysis and dissection of cortical circuits in the frontal cortex, it begins to become possible to begin to link changes in gene expression with the physiological properties of specific cells and local circuits in the frontal cortex. The reason this is an exciting pursuit is because the mammalian neocortex is organized in a type of layered fashion wherein 6 major layers have different types of connectivity and functionality.  The developmental origins of this functional specificity are thought to lie in a process known as radial migration (here is a video of a neuron as it migrates radially and finds its place in the cortical hierarchy).  As cells are queued out of the ventricular zone, and begin their migration to the cortical surface, they are exposed to all sorts of growth factors and morphogens that help them differentiate and form the proper connectivities.  Thus, the genes that regulate this process are of keen interest to understanding normal and abnormal cognitive development.

Here’s an amazing example of this – 2 papers entitled, “Infragranular gene expression disturbances in the prefrontal cortex in schizophrenia: Signature of altered neural development?” [doi:10.1016/j.nbd.2009.12.013] and “Molecular markers distinguishing supragranular and infragranular layers in the human prefrontal cortex [doi:10.1111/j.1460-9568.2007.05396.x] both by Dominique Arion and colleagues.  In both papers, the authors ask, “what genes are differentially expressed in different layers of the cortex?”.  This is a powerful line of inquiry since the different layers of cortex are functionally different in terms of their connectivity.  For example, layers II-III (the so-called supragranular layers) are known to connect mainly to other cortical neurons – which is different functionally than layers V-VI (the so-called infragranular layers) that connect mainly to the striatum (layer V) and thalamus (layer VI).  Thus, if there are genes whose expression is unique to a layer, then one has a clue as to how that gene might contribute to normal/abnormal information processing.

The authors hail from a laboratory that is well-known for work over many years on fine-scaled histological analysis of the frontal cortex at the University of Pittsburgh and used a method called, laser capture microdissection, where post-mortem sections of human frontal cortex (area 46) were cut to separate the infragraular layer from the supragranular layer.  The mRNA from these tissue sections was then used for DNA microarray hybridization.  Various controls, replicate startegies and in-situ tissue hybridizations were then employed to validate the initial microarray results.

In first paper, the where the authors compare infra vs. supragranular layers, they report that 40 genes were more highly expressed in the supragranular layers (HOP, CUTL2 and MPPE1 were among the most enriched) and 29 genes were highly expressed in the infragranular layers (ZNF312, CHN2, HS3ST2 were among the most enriched).  Other differentially expressed genes included several that have previously been implicated in cortical layer formation such as RLN, TLX-NR2E1, SEMA3E, PCP4, SERPINE2, NR2F2/ARP1, PCDH8, WIF1, JAG1, MBP.  Amazing!! A handful of genes that seem to label subpopulations of projection neurons in the frontal cortex.  Polymorphic markers for these genes would surely be powerful tools for imaging-genetic studies on cognitive development.

In the second paper, the authors compare infra vs. supragranular gene expression in post-mortem brains from patients with schizophrenia and healthy matched controls. Using the same methods, the team reports both supra- and infragranular gene expression changes in schizophrenia (400 & 1200 differences respectively) – more than 70% of the differences appearing to be reductions in gene expression in schizophrenia. Interestingly, the team reports that the genes that were differentially expressed in the infragranular layers provided sufficient information to discriminate between cases and controls, whilst the gene expression differences in the supragranular layers did not.  More to the point, the team finds that 51 genes that were differentially expressed in infra- vs. supragranular expression were also differentially expressed in cases vs. controls  (many of these are also found to be associated in population genetic association studies of schiz vs. control as well!).  Thus, the team has identified layer (function) -specific genes that are associated with schizophrenia.  These genes, the ones enriched in the infragranular layers especially, seem to be at the crux of a poorly functioning frontal cortex.

The authors point to 3 such genes (SEMA3E, SEMA6D, SEMA3C) who happen to members of the same gene family – the semaphorin gene family.  This gene family is very important for the neuronal guidance (during radial migration), morphology, pruning and other processes where cell shape and position are regulated.  The authors propose that the semaphorins might act as “integrators” of various forms of wiring during development and in adulthood.  More broadly, the authors provide a framework to understand how the development of connectivity on the frontal cortex is regulated by genetic factors – indeed, many suspected genetic risk factors play a role in the developmental pathways the authors have focused on.

Here’s an example.  One of the most well studied circuits/networks/systems in the field of cognitive science are so-called basal-ganglia-thalamcortical loops.  These loops have been implicated in a great many forms of cognitive function involving the regulation of everything from movement, emotion and memory to reasoning ability.  Not surprisingly, neuroimaging studies on cognitive function almost always find activations in this circuitry.  In many cases, the data from neuroimaging and other methodologies suggests that one portion of this circuitry – the frontal cortex – plays a role in the representation of such aspects as task rules, relationships between task variables and associations between possible choices and outcomes.  This would be sort of like the “thinking” part of our mental life where we ruminate on all the possible choices we have and the ins and outs of what each choice has to offer.  Have you ever gone into a Burger King and – even though you’ve known for 20 years what’s on the menu – you freeze up and become lost in thought just as its your turn to place your order?  Your frontal cortex is at work!

The other aspect of this circuitry is the subcortical basla ganglia, which seems to play the downstream role of processing all that ruminating activity going on in the frontal cortex and filtering it down into a single action.  This is a simple fact of life – that we can be thinking about dozens of things at a time, but we can only DO 1 thing at a time.  Alas, we must choose something at Burger King and place our order.  Indeed, one of the hallmarks of mental illness seems to be that this circuitry functions poorly – which may be why individuals have difficulty in keeping their thoughts and actions straight – the thinking clearly and acting clearly aspect of healthy mental life.  Certainly, in neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s Disease and Huntington’s Disease, where this circuitry is damaged, the ability to think and move one’s body in a coordinated fashion is disrupted.

Thus, there are at least 2 main components to a complex system/circuits/networks that are involved in many aspects of learning and decision making in everyday life.  Therefore, if we wanted to understand how a gene – that is expressed in both portions of this circuitry – inflenced our mental life, we would have to interpret its function in relation to each specific portion of the circuitry.  In otherwords, the gene might effect the prefrontal (thinking) circuitry in one way and the basla-ganglia (action-selection) circuitry in a different way.  Since we’re all familiar with the experience of walking in to a Burger King and seeing folks perplexed and frozen as they stare at the menu, perhaps its not too difficult to imagine that a gene might differentially influence the ruminating process (hmm, what shall I have today?) and the action selection (I’ll take the #3 combo) aspect of this eveyday occurrance (for me, usually 2 times per week).

Nice idea you say, but does the idea flow from solid science?  Well, check out the recent paper from Cindy M. de Frias and colleagues “Influence of COMT Gene Polymorphism on fMRI-assessed Sustained and Transient Activity during a Working Memory Task.” [PMID: 19642882].  In this paper, the authors probed the function of a single genetic variant (rs4680 is the Methionine/Valine variant of the dopamine metabolizing COMT gene) on cognitive functions that preferentially rely on the prefronal cortex as well as mental operations that rely heavily on the basal-ganglia.  As an added bonus, the team also probed the function of the hippocampus – yet a different set of circuits/networks that are important for healthy mental function.  OK, so here is 1 gene who is functioning  within 3 separable (yet connected) neural networks!

The team focused on a well-studied Methionine/Valine variant of the dopamine metabolizing COMT gene which is broadly expessed across the pre-frontal (thinking) part of the circuitry and the basal-ganglia part of the circuitry (action-selection) as well as the hippocampus.  The team performed a neuroimaging study wherein participants (11 Met/Met and 11 Val/Val) subjects had to view a series of words presented one-at-a-time and respond if they recalled that a word was a match to the word presented 2-trials beforehand  (a so-called “n-back task“).  In this task, each of the 3 networks/circuits (frontal cortex, basal-ganglia and hippocampus) are doing somewhat different computations – and have different needs for dopamine (hence COMT may be doing different things in each network).  In the prefrontal cortex, according to a theory proposed by Robert Bilder and colleagues [doi:10.1038/sj.npp.1300542] the need is for long temporal windows of sustained neuronal firing – known as tonic firing (neuronal correlate with trying to “keep in mind” all the different words that you are seeing).  The authors predicted that under conditions of tonic activity in the frontal cortex, dopamine release promotes extended tonic firing and that Met/Met individuals should produce enhanced tonic activity.  Indeed, when the authors looked at their data and asked, “where in the brain do we see COMT gene associations with extended firing? they found such associations in the frontal cortex (frontal gyrus and cingulate cortex)!

Down below, in the subcortical networks, a differerent type of cognitive operation is taking place.  Here the cells/circuits are involved in the action selection (press a button) of whether the word is a match and in the working memory updating of each new word.  Instead of prolonged, sustained “tonic” neuronal firing, the cells rely on fast, transient “phasic” bursts of activity.  Here, the modulatory role of dopamine is expected to be different and the Bilder et al. theory predicts that COMT Val/Val individuals would be more efficient at modulating the fast, transient form of cell firing required here.   Similarly, when the research team explored their genotype and brain activity data and asked, “where in the brain do we see COMT gene associations with transient firing? they found such associations in the right hippocampus.

Thus, what can someone who carries the Met/Met genotype at rs4680 say to their fellow Val/Val lunch-mate next time they visit a Burger King?  “I have the gene for obesity? or impulsivity? or “this” or “that”?  Perhaps not.  The gene influences different parts of each person’s neural networks in different ways.  The Met/Met having the advantage in pondering (perhaps more prone to annoyingly gaze at the menu forever) whist the Val/Val has the advantage in the action selecting (perhaps ordering promptly but not getting the best burger and fries combo).