GENE chips are allowing researchers to fish for genes involved in complex
neurological diseases and brain development.
These “microarrays” let scientists measure the activity of thousands of genes
at a time. We can pick out genes that we would never have thought to test, says
Pat Levitt of the University of Pittsburgh. “It’s a hypothesis-free system.”
Levitt’s group looked at the activity levels of 7000 genes in post-mortem
brain tissue from 22 people with schizophrenia. There was a big decrease in the
activity of several genes, but just one was common to all of the samples.
The gene produces a…
