Sooner or later, someone, with more or less good intentions – or perhaps in a totally misleading way – ends up asking the little one in the house: who do you love more, dad or mom? The question does not seem to make much sense, among other things because most children tend to say that they love both equally, but a team of researchers from different American institutions assures in a new study that, in reality, many times our neurons take the decision for us and they choose the genes of one of the parents .
As these experts explain in the journal Neuron , although we all inherit two copies of each of the genes – one comes from the mother and the other from the father – brain cells tend to activate one instead of the other. This approach collides with one of the most widely accepted hypotheses so far, which assumes that both are treated equally. On the contrary, these neuroscientists, coordinated by Christopher Gregg, professor of Neurobiology and Anatomy at the University of Utah School of Medicine, highlight that inequality is common in certain brain areas . That’s at least what their mouse trials suggest.
For example, in newborn rodents this differentiation occurs in almost 85% of the genes in the dorsal nucleus of the raphe, a region involved in the release of serotonin – a neurotransmitter involved in the regulation of mood states. However, just ten days later, this scenario changes completely, and in 90% of the genes, the aforementioned copies, the maternal and the paternal, are activated indistinctly.
Gregg and his colleagues point out that this disparity is not a rarity of the brain, but occurs in other parts of the body , such as the muscles and the liver. In addition, it also occurs in humans. “When we think about a person’s traits, we tend to imagine them as a whole, but at the cellular level, genetics are more complex than we think,” says Gregg.
This neuroscientist hopes that his work will shed some light on the origin of different mental ailments . Thus, although it is yet to be determined what role the genetic imbalance they have detected plays in their appearance, among the genes that present this, so to speak, unorthodox behavior are some related to autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder , among other conditions.
“Normally, the fact of having two copies of a gene works as a kind of security system, in case one is defective. But if the one that has mutated is activated and the healthy one is silenced, even temporarily, problems can arise in certain cells, “explains the University of Utah in a statement. In fact, Gregg’s group has observed that in the neurons of transgenic mice, the mutated ones used to be activated more than the healthy ones.
Image: Spherical Chicken Studios / University of Utah
