'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 -- Judith Richards, London, Ontario, Canada [log in to unmask] Today’s Research... Tomorrow’s Cure