Jewels that may help explain behavioral disorders found among ...( Scientists have been looking for genes ...)

Speaking on Dec. 8 at the annual meeting of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology held in San Juan, Puerto Rico, McInnes advised that those interested in genetic links to behavior should start looking at places in the genome that produce special molecules called small non-messenger RNA (smnRNA) rather than concentrating on genes that code for proteins.

Current genetic screening techniques do not pick up these sequences because they are very small and not much is known about their structure. So McInnes and her colleagues at Mt. Sinai have created a computational and molecular screening technique designed specifically to look for smnRNA molecules produced by regions in the genome that have been associated with behavioral disorders. Furthermore, they have used this method to successfully identify such molecules in the first few genes that they investigated, she reported.

The existence of smnRNAs has been known for some time. Until recently, they have been generally dismissed as unimportant. New studies are finding that they are actually quite abundant and involved in a wide variety of biological processes. As a result, some scientists are beginning to speculate that they may represent an entirely new class of gene and type of gene activity.

McInnes cited the theoretical work of John Mattick and Michael Gagen at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. Last year they published a lengthy paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution in which they argued that, rather than being useless, smnRNAs and introns the sequences in the genome between genes that code for proteins that have been called junk DNA form a powerful network that can turn ordinary genes on and
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Contact: Dr. Oakley Ray
oray@acnp.org
615-594-2631
American College of Neuropsychopharmacology
8-Dec-2002