Author: Donald Doherty

It’s clear to me that the way we will communicate and learn about biology will be very different from the textbooks and journal articles of today. It’ll be done through online simulations and visualizations of biological systems linked with their raw data sources.

A number of XML vocabularies have been or are being developed that are important tools towards achieving this goal. One is the Biological Pathway Exchange (BioPAX) vocabulary.

The team largely responsible for creating BioPAX over a number of years just published a paper “The BioPAX community standard for pathway data sharing” in the September 9, 2010 online issue of Nature Biotechnology.

A new paper describes the creation and maintenance of functional brain cell (neuron) networks (average size 41 neurons) within a simulated network of 1000 neurons that could be a mechanism underlying working memory.

The focus is on the precise timing of signals in the brain and their importance in forming functional networks with properties observed in recordings from brain areas involved in working memory. One of the attractive properties of these networks is that a large number of them can form over overlapping sets of neurons providing a way to pack a lot of memories into a relatively small set of brain cells.

The paper, by Szatmary and Izhikevich, is titled “Spike-Timing Theory of Working Memory” was published in the August 2010 issue of PLOS Computational Biology.

A recent review paper by Minshew and Keller looks at progress understanding autism and autism spectrum disorders using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies and functional connectivity fMRI (fc-fMRI).

The paper is titled “The nature of brain dysfunction in autism: functional brain imaging studies” and was published April 2010 in Current Opinion in Neurology.

Studies using fMRI correlate heightened brain-region activation with particular behaviors. The more recent technique of fc-fMRI enables the researcher to correlate the ability of one brain area to active another area with particular behaviors. It seems that some of the most exciting new insights into autism have been gained using fc-fMRI.

Some of the findings discussed include:

• Autism as a distributed cortical systems disorder resulting from the underdevelopment of connections between brain regions.
• Structural imaging has shown accelerated brain growth beginning by 9–12 months of age coincident with the onset of symptoms and composed of increased total cerebral gray and white matter volumes.
• Connections between the front and back (frontal-posterior regions) of the brain were commonly found to be less than normal in the autistic brain.
• A study demonstrated the potential to increase connectivity in the autistic person. Ten weeks of reading intervention in poor readers resulted in improved reading and measurable changes in connectivity and white matter volume.
• It’s easy to overestimate and exceed the language skills of a verbal person with autism. Although the autistic person may use the same words, their brains are wired differently. They show a greater reliance on visuospatial skills and the visual areas of the brain for solving both visual and verbal problems and reduced activity in the brain’s language areas.
• When shown a movie, the brain in a person with autism perceived a different movie from other people with and without autism. The same person with autism saw a somewhat similar movie each time they viewed the same movie.

In summary, the review paper by Minshew and Keller demonstrates clear progress in elucidating differences in structure and function of the typical brain from the brains of people with autism. Perhaps most exciting is that studies are appearing suggesting interventions based on our new knowledge.