(ANSA) – TRIESTE, 11 JUN – From hypersensitivity to clothes to extreme visual attention to detail: about 90% of people with autism report atypical sensory experiences. The origin of this would be an imbalance of neuronal activity. A new project by the neuroscientist of the International Higher School of Advanced Studies (Sissa) Davide Zoccolan, funded by the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (Sfari), aims to test this hypothesis in the visual system.
The project, according to schedule, will start in October and for two years the scientist will study the visual abilities and underlying neuronal processes in a genetically modified type of rat.
“Unlike mice – explains Zoccolan – which have much more limited cognitive functions and levels of social interactions than humans, the rat is superior at the behavioral level, at the level of the social structure of the groups in which it lives and at the level of cognitive capacity”.
Zoccolan will team up with behavioral and neurophysiological experiments to study visual processes in animals carrying a mutation in a gene strongly involved in autism. The researchers will verify the presence of visual abnormalities similar to those reported in autistic people and will investigate the cortical processes involved: “We have proposed experiments that test this perceptual behavioral point of view to investigate what neuronal correlates are and how they differ from animals. neurotypical “. The first objective will be “to characterize these models”. Subsequently, “discovering how the visual properties are altered in these animals could have a strong impact on the understanding of the neuronal processes that characterize autism spectrum disorders. This could pave the way for new therapeutic strategies that go to reactivate specific components of the nervous circuits through techniques of opto- and chemo-genetics “.
The project is one of seven funded by Sfari, which together with the Medical College of Wisconsin has developed eight different mutant rat models to enable the study of autism and preclinical testing of possible therapies. (HANDLE).
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