UW Student's Neuroscience Research Provides Insight into Mental Retardation

April 23, 2007 -- University of Wyoming neuroscience research published in ScienceDirect, one of the world's largest online collections of published science research, provides new insight into the most common inherited cause of mental retardation.

Lead researcher Leah Selby of Cheyenne, a UW senior double majoring in zoology and physiology and Spanish, studied the genetic disorder fragile X syndrome (FXS), a condition cited for abnormalities ranging from minor learning disabilities to mental retardation. According to research, FXS causes mental retardation in one in 4,000 males and one in 8,000 females.

Selby, along with more than 200 of Wyoming's undergraduate students at UW and the state's community colleges, will present research findings at Undergraduate Research Day, Saturday, April 28.

Qian-Quan Sun, assistant professor in the UW Department of Zoology and Physiology, and Chunzhao Zhang, technician for UW's National Institutes of Health Center of Biomedical Research Excellence, assisted Selby's neuroscience research. They focused on determining the neural causes of some common FXS symptoms including hypersensitivity to the environment, anxiety disorders and autistic behaviors.

"Many people think of the brain as being very active, but many parts are involved in the reduction of information received. Some of the symptoms associated with FXS may be a result of the brain not filtering out information, which would explain why individuals with FXS can feel so overwhelmed," Selby says. "In our research we found a certain subset of inhibitory cells that are reduced or abnormal in people with FXS. These cells may be contributing to or causing the symptoms."

Although much research has been conducted about FXS, the UW study is the first to report on abnormalities specifically in the GABA (inhibitory) circuitry, Selby says, adding that the research findings will lead to further study of the GABAergic inhibitory system.

"In subjects with FXS, we found a certain set of neurons that are abnormal, which leads us to believe the nonfunctioning protein is targeting these specific neurons," Selby says.

"We're now looking to see if we can pinpoint when (the abnormality) happens," she says. "In the future there could be treatments that could prevent this abnormality and perhaps reduce some of the symptoms we see in FXS. People would have less anxiety or be more comfortable in changing environments."

Selby, who has been accepted into WWAMI, the University of Wyoming's medical education program affiliated with the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, received two fellowships from the National Science Foundation Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) to complete the groundbreaking neuroscience research.

"EPSCoR is a great program for initiating and allowing students to pursue research," she says. "I was lucky to publish (as an undergraduate), but the program introduces every one of its students to the world of research and helps them into graduate school where they may be more likely to publish and contribute to the scientific community."

Posted on Monday, April 23, 2007