Risk (Factor) Assessment

Schizophrenia is a complex disorder meaning that many different genes and environmental factors contribute to its development. But, for many of these risk factors, how and why they influence the condition is a mystery. Take SAP97, for example. Mutations to this protein result in a whopping 40 percent increase in schizophrenia risk, but the protein’s normal function, let alone its role in schizophrenia, were unknown. Scientists studying rats have now discovered the SAP97 mutations cause a dramatic increase in cell communication in one of the brain’s memory centres – the dentate gyrus (the C-shaped structure in this section of rat hippocampus). In turn, this excessive activity impairs the animals’ contextual memory (rats were unable to recognise out-of-context objects). Both the dentate gyrus and impaired contextual memory have been implicated in schizophrenia, suggesting the findings have relevance to humans and may inform the development of future schizophrenia treatments.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

Writer

Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

Website

• Image from work by Yuni Kay and colleagues, USC Dornsife
• Department of Biological Sciences, Neurobiology Section, Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Published in Nature Communications, February 2022