DYSLEXIA has long been thought to have a genetic component. Now researchers may have pinpointed a specific dyslexia gene.
Jeffrey Gruen at Yale University and his colleagues genotyped 536 individuals from 153 nuclear families who had dyslexia. They scoured a region of chromosome 6 that was already associated with dyslexia and found a deletion in a gene called DCDC2, which is expressed in high levels in parts of the brain involved in reading.
Gruen’s team then studied the gene’s role during early development in “knockout” rats – ones in which the gene was deliberately impaired. They found that neural cells failed to migrate as they should…
