Research: A group of Irish geneticists have made a significant breakthrough in the search for an elusive gene that may hold the secrets to autism.
An unusual collaboration between Trinity College and UCD helped the group take a substantial step forward when their joint work pointed them towards a specific area on what is known as Chromosone 2 - chromosomes are structures containing genes. Almost every human chromosome contains thousands of individual genes.
When a team at the UCD-sponsored National Centre of Medical Genetics screened samples from a PhD project by Trinity research student Dr Louise Gallagher, they found an abnormality on the same part, or region, of Chromosone 2 that their own work had focused on.
Linkage between this region of Chromosome 2 and autism has been reported by at least three research teams. There are a number of genes associated with neuro-developmental function on Chromosome 2, and several of these are being considered as possible candidate genes for autism in the future.
The Irish results subsequently brought them to the attention of the Autism Genome Project (AGP), an ambitious worldwide project funded and co-ordinated by an American organisation whose ultimate aim is to find a cure for the disorder.
Set up by concerned parents a decade ago to boost funding for research, the US-based National Alliance for Autism Research (NAAR) has mushroomed into an organisation which has, to date, committed €17 million to hundreds of projects.
NAAR boasts the backing of several US politicians and celebrities, including Dustin Hoffman, who played the role of an autistic savant in the film Rain Man. In this, its largest initiative to date, the organisation aims to pool the manpower, resources and samples of all previous studies of this type across the globe.
The Irish collaboration is headed by Prof Andrew Green of UCD and Dr Michael Gill of TCD. Dr Sean Ellis works at the National Centre of Medical Genetics at Crumlin Hospital with Prof Green: "We started working on this project about four or five years ago and we came across a similar piece of work by Dr Louise Gallagher, who was working in the Department of Psychiatry in Trinity."
The Irish project takes place in two phases. Phase one, which began last month, will help to define further the region where the gene or genes may lie. Then, about a year from now, phase two will begin the mapping process.