Dr RICARDO SEGURADO explains the significance of his glutamate study to ADAM FEINSTEIN, editor of LOOKING UP (extract)

From Volume 4 Number 1

ADAM FEINSTEIN, Editor, Looking Up: What do you think the implications of your study could be? I know that glutamate is the principal excitatory neurotransmitter in the brain and is directly involved in cognitive functions such as memory and learning. I believe that some studies have found glutamate and aspartate levels to be significantly elevated in autistic individuals relative to controls. How could this manifest itself clinically?

Dr RICARDO SEGURADO: We are hoping to do some more work on it. However, we have a few other strands that are probably of higher priority at the moment. This was a  bit of a side study - a strong hypothesis, and easy to perform, and of course with an interesting result at the end of it. I know Dr Joseph Buxbaum's  group at Mount Sinai have been looking into it further. When we're looking at a very small scale along the DNA strand (at the level of genes or parts of genes), we can sometimes see
small stretches of DNA that have been inherited unchanged down many many generations. It's a phenomenon called linkage disequilibrium, and the stretch is sometimes called a  haplotype block ...

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