U researchers have found two genes that affect a person’s ability to draw pictures and communicate with family and strangers, which could help them find drugs that are useful for treating genetic disorders.
Julie Korenberg, a pediatrics professor and researcher at the U Brain Institute, has been studying different social behaviors in children with Williams syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes developmental problems. People with Williams syndrome have about 25 genes missing, some of which U researchers now know directly affect social behavior.
“The average IQ of these patients is around 54,” said Li Dai, a research scientist at the Brain Institute who worked on the study. “If you look at subtests though, most people with (Williams syndrome) are good at language but have problems with visual-spatial performance. If you ask them to draw a picture of a bicycle, they can only draw pieces of the bicycle.”
The typical person with Williams syndrome is missing all 25 genes, but researchers found two specific genes that play a part in behavioral abnormality by studying children who have one or two of the missing genes and are still classified as having Williams syndrome.
Dai said many people with the disorder would greet strangers as if they were family members and friends, but have problems keeping relationships.
Researchers studied how one girl, who had one of the 25 genes, interacted with people she didn’t know.
“This little girl spent less time with strangers, more time with relatives,” Dai said. “She had no problem talking with her peers.”
Those and other results showed researchers at the U and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California, which collaborated on the study, that certain genes are linked to social behaviors.
Korenberg said it’s difficult to find children with Williams syndrome who have some of the typically missing genes. The research group also studied children who had a second non-missing gene and found those children had better visual-spatial performance than normal.
“What we have is a hint to the brain’s pathways that connect genes,” Korenberg said. “Now we can start to ask what genes are interacting with others and what regions of the brain seem to be changed.”
The research team is studying other genes that affect social and cognitive behavior.
“We’re devoted to understanding how the brain functions and what the genetic wiring is that determines the circuits in the brain responsible for human behavior and emotion, which includes problems such as anxiety and depression,” Korenberg said.
The study was completed after 15 years of research and data collection and was published online Feb. 9 in the American Journal of Medical Genetics.