Prairie voles aid in search for autism treatment

Researchers at Emory’s Center for Translational Social Neuroscience (CTSN) are focusing on prairie voles as a new model to screen the effectiveness of drugs to treat autism.

They are starting with D-cycloserine, a drug Emory researchers have shown enhances behavioral therapy for phobias and also promotes pair bonding among prairie voles. Giving female voles D-cycloserine, which is thought to facilitate learning and memory, can encourage them to bond with a new male more quickly than usual. The findings will be published in Biological Psychiatry.

“The prairie vole model has enabled us to learn about complex neural pathways in social areas of the brain,” says Larry Young (at left) director of the CTSN. “We believe these insights will be useful in identifying drugs that enhance social cognition and learning. Drugs with these properties, particularly when combined with behavioral therapies, may be beneficial in the treatment of autism spectrum disorders.”

The prairie vole is one of the few species in nature that is monogamous and that creates deep social bonds while mating. The basic mechanisms of voles’ and humans’ social learning are similar enough that the learning that occurs during voles’ pair bonding can model complex human social interactions. Young and his colleagues have used voles to show the importance for social interactions of hormones such as oxytocin, which has also been proposed as a treatment for autism spectrum disorders.

The first author of the paper is Emory graduate student Meera Modi. She showed that D-cycloserine promotes pair bonding in prairie voles when it is injected peripherally. By infusing the drug directly into specific regions of the brain, she also showed the importance of two regions linked to social learning and reward, the nucleus accumbens and amygdala.

"We think D-cycloserine interacts with the brain's social information processing circuits to enhance the natural learning processes that occur there,” Modi says.

Emory researchers have shown D-cycloserine can be used to treat psychiatric diseases such as phobias and social anxiety. It is now in clinical trials for treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. D-cycloserine is thought to enhance learning by acting on receptors for the neurotransmitter glutamate.

Autism spectrum disorders affect one in 110 children in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Currently there are no drugs that specifically target social deficits found in individuals with autism, Young notes. Most drugs now prescribed for individuals with autism were originally developed for other disorders such as depression or schizophrenia.

The research was supported by a fellowship from Autism Speaks and by the National Institutes of Health.

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Monkey memory mirrors that of humans

"For the first time, monkeys can actually tell us what they recollect," psychologist Ben Basile says of the new computer touchscreen method of testing memory. Photo and video (below) by Ben Basile.

By Carol Clark

Like humans, monkeys can recall and reproduce simple shapes from memory, a new study clearly shows for the first time.

The finding by Emory University psychologists Ben Basile and Robert Hampton was published today in Current Biology. The psychologists developed a computer touchscreen method to test the recall power of rhesus monkeys, drawing on the resources of Yerkes National Primate Research Center.

“Our observations of recall in Old World monkeys suggests that it may have been adaptive in primates for more than 30 million years, and that it does not depend on language or anything else that is uniquely human,” Basile says.

“We believe we have found a new method for testing animals that opens a whole new window into the world of non-human memory research,” Basile adds. “For the first time, monkeys can actually tell us what they recollect, and their test results are directly comparable to human tests.”

Humans have many different forms of memory that can be used in different ways. Recognition, for instance, demonstrates your ability to identify your house when shown a picture of it. Recall shows your ability to draw or describe your house, based solely on your memory of it.

In humans, recognition and recall tests can be supported by two different types of memory. This difference is most clearly seen in some rare cases of amnesia, where patients can easily recognize objects that are before them, but have lost the ability to recall those same objects when they are out of sight.

Previous research has established the ability of monkeys and many other animals to recognize objects. The problem of language, however, has thwarted efforts to test recall in non-humans.

The Emory scientists overcame the language barrier by teaching the rhesus monkeys to “draw.” The monkeys were shown simple shapes on a computer screen. Later, they were presented with a computer touchscreen that allowed them to recreate those shapes by touching the corresponding areas of a grid. The monkeys learned through trial and error that reproducing the shapes they had seen previously would bring a food reward. Once trained, the monkeys were able to transfer their memory skill to novel shapes.

The performance of the monkeys on the computer touchscreen paralleled that of humans using the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure Test, a standard human recall test, in which subjects draw a complicated shape from memory.

Related: Visit the Laboratory of Comparative Primate Cognition, and watch demonstrations of more experiments.

“Humans certainly recall more complex and sophisticated things over longer time periods,” Basile says. “But we’ve shown that for simple shapes, monkeys have a pattern of performance for recognition and recall that mirrors that of humans. And their ability to immediately transfer their performance to new shapes suggests that we’re tapping into some general cognitive capacity.”

Different types of memory may have evolved to solve a range of problems. Recognizing something as familiar, for instance, is quick and might allow for rapid responses to sightings of food and predators. Recollecting absent information is slower, and might support a more detailed and flexible use of memory, possibly knowledge of distant food locations or past social interactions for planning future behavior.

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Is it ethical to study dolphins in captivity?

iStockphoto.com

How smart are dolphins? Recent research suggests that some species of dolphins, particularly the bottlenose, may even be brighter than our closest living primate relative, the chimpanzee.

Does dolphin intelligence have ethical implications for how we interact with them?

You can join in a live "Science Now" discussion of the ethics of studying dolphins in captivity on Thursday, April 28, at 3 pm.

UPDATED, 4 pm on April 28: The full transcript of the dolphin debate is now available, click here.

Emory neuroscientist Lori Marino, who specializes in the neuroanatomy of dolphins, will be talking with Richard Conner, a biologist from the University of Massachusetts School of Marine Sciences who studies dolphin behavior.

Click here to join the live chat, hosted by Science, the journal of the American Society for the Advancement of Science.

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If a tree falls, learn from it

By Kelly Gray

Emory is reusing its dead or fallen trees as wood supplies for new kiosks that will help guide visitors in the campus' Lullwater Preserve.

The kiosks will be part of "Emory as Place," an educational initiative about the breadth and diversity of life within the campus and bioregion. From each kiosk, visitors will be able to synch their smartphones to Emory's sustainability map and learn more about the history and ecology of Lullwater.

"Tours of Lullwater provide an introduction to the history, ecosystems and ethical responsibilities in Lullwater that support our institutional legacy. The reuse of these trees is another interesting component in that history," says Ciannat Howett, director of sustainability intitiatives.



Most trees that die in Lullwater are left standing to allow for natural decomposition and to provide habitat for wildlife. But a white oak and two red oaks were recently harvested because they were a potential hazard for pedestrians.

Typically most large commercial lumber yards will not accept urban trees, which often have hidden metal objects in their tree trunks that can damage commercial band saws and shut down production lines.

Mississippi Wood Trader, however, is a unique lumber mill in Atlanta that provides wood for institutional and private customers. The large trees the urban mill processes are typically 80-100 years old, and are used for flooring, beams, molding, table and bar tops.

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Research takes flight in digital age

Nancy Seideman, Emory’s executive director of media relations, writes in the Academic Exchange:

The decision to enter a scholarly manuscript into the public sphere used to be more of a deliberate one.

Today there is no choice to make. Boundaries between academia and broader society have blurred considerably. Within academia, the pace of dissemination of scholarly work has quickened with the proliferation of electronic and open-access publication, coupled with the tremendous growth of social media and Internet channels of dissemination and the transformation of the still influential and far-reaching mainstream media.

Photo credit: iStockphoto.com.

It’s the job of today’s scholars to take the time to master communications skills and media tools in order to fulfill their civic responsibility to help translate and make accessible research that means something to people. In doing so, we need to resist the frequent pressure from the media and the general public to make a leap from fundamental research to application or revelation.

"Meaning something,” after all, can take many forms: inviting people to share in the thrill of discovery, unearthing the brittle piece of paper in an archive that provides a clue in an historical mystery, uncovering a family ledger that reveals how a famous author developed his characters, identifying a molecule that just might have help in treatment of an intractable disease. People hunger for knowledge, for experiencing that sense of wonder and excitement of exploration that only the academic world can provide.

Read more.

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