'Chips' Dip Into Brain Behavior
 By Nicolle Charbonneau - HealthSCOUT Reporter

MONDAY, Sept. 25, 2000 (HealthSCOUT) -- A wafer of glass not much larger
       than the tip of your thumb could someday help scientists protect
your brain cells from the trauma of a seizure, the shaking of
PARKINSON'S or the mental decay of Alzheimer's disease.

Using new "gene chip" technology, researchers at the Salk Institute for
Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., compared the entire lineup of
genes in two types of mice to find out how gene behavior differed
between each
strain during a seizure. The findings, which appear in tomorrow's issue
of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may someday
affect how doctors treat people having a severe form of epileptic
seizure.

Traditionally, says neurobiologist Dr. Carrolee Barlow, biologists have
looked at one gene at a time to figure out if it's involved in a
particular disease. But with the advent of the Human Genome Project,
scientists were suddenly dealing with tens of thousands of genes,
meaning that the old-fashioned search methods could take forever.

Barlow, the study's senior author, says the solution lay in the form of
gene chips -- one-inch-square glass wafers that can contain 10,000
genes. The researchers wanted to know whether these gene chips could
help them understand various brain diseases. For this study, they used
chips containing the 13,000 known genes for mice.

The two strains of mice differed in one important aspect. In one, many
brain cells died when a seizure was triggered; in the other, relatively
few brain cells died. The scientists found about 70 genes that showed
different
levels of activation between the two strains of mice.

"Now what we have are some candidates. We can start understanding which
of these candidates are responsible for specific ways that those two
very different strains of mice are," says Barlow. "We have a handful of
genes that might make these mice so different from each other."

Furthermore, "what we found was in this strain of mouse that's very
resistant to cell death caused by seizures, about 30 more genes were
turned on. Now, what we can ask is, what are those genes, and what do
they do? And is there any way that we could replace some of those genes
or get them to go on in a seizure so that your neurons wouldn't get
killed?"

While this may not help researchers prevent epileptic seizures, this
could be particularly important in situations such as status
epilepticus, a dangerous medical situation where seizures continue,
without recovery, for  between five and 30 minutes, depending on the
seizure type. If this condition lasts more than one hour, you've got
about a one in three chance of dying.

Barlow says these findings could also be relevant to neurological
disorders such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

These findings are just the tip of the iceberg, says Dr. Daniel
Geschwind, the director of the neurogenetics program at the University
of California, Los  Angeles. "[Gene chips] will revolutionize our
understanding of gene      expression," he says. "You could even
imagine, in the future, personalizing drug therapy."

This capability, which may be available in 10-15 years, could allow you
to now which drugs would be most effective for you and which might cause
an allergic reaction, says Geschwind. But this research is in its very
earliest stages, so right now, your doctor is your best source of
treatment.

It's a bit technical, but if you'd like to read more about gene chips,
try Gene-Chips.com.

Want to know what you can do if someone has a seizure-and how to tell if
you're dealing with status epilepticus? Check out the British Epilepsy
Association. You can learn more about status epilepticus from Neuroland.

To read about recent research into epilepsy, check out these previous
HealthSCOUT stories.
  Copyright © 2000 Yahoo! Inc./ Copyright © 2000 Healthscout.com


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Judith Richards, London, Ontario, Canada
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