Brain Cells Grown from Skin Cells Reveal Certain Effects of Down Syndrome

from Counsel & Heal by Cheri Cheng:
Brain disorders, such as Down syndrome, which is the most common type of hereditary intellectual disability, are some of the hardest conditions to understand. There are multiple mechanisms and levels of activity that occur in the brain that make it difficult to pinpoint the exact relationships between genetic mutations and the symptoms they cause. In Down syndrome people, in particular, researchers know that the condition results from an extra copy of a single chromosome. Researchers do not know how this one copy could result in a wide range of symptoms. In an attempt to understand this, researcher Anita Bhattacharyya, a neuroscientist at the Waisman Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studied brain cells that were created from the skin cells of people with Down syndrome.
"Even though Down syndrome is very common, it's surprising how little we know about what goes wrong in the brain. These new cells provide a way to look at early brain development," she explained.