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Research findings will help identify genetic causes of brain disorders

November 27, 2017

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New findings will help to identify the genetic causes of brain disorders: researchers at the Universities of Basel, Bonn and Cologne have presented a systematic catalog of specific variable locations in the genome that influence gene activity in the human hippocampus, as they report in the journal Nature Communications.

Individual differences in gene regulation contribute to the development of numerous multifactorial disorders. Researchers are therefore attempting to clarify the influence of genetic variants (single-nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs) on gene expression and on the epigenetic modification of regulatory sections of the genome (DNA methylation). The German-Swiss team has now studied the genetic determinants of gene expression, as well as the process of DNA methylation in the human hippocampus.

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