Abstract
It has been hypothesized that in neurodevelopmental psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and autism, biological processes in brain development may be affected by genetic and environmental causes, leading to alterations in brain wiring and/or synaptic formation and function, which manifest as characteristic phenotypes of these disorders. In fact, genetic studies have identified several genetic changes associated with schizophrenia and autism that would alter molecular pathways involved in brain development. It is also noted that the same genetic changes would lead to different clinical entities, such as autism and schizophrenia, emphasizing the importance of understanding basic neurobiology of brain wiring and synapse formation/function, in order to understand how functional alterations (and distinct phenotypes among psychiatric disorders) appear when those processes go away in these psychiatric disorders. To this end, we could take advantage of genetic findings in humans to develop mouse models with construct validity that have alterations in genes associated with these psychiatric disorders in humans and should gain insights into neurobiology underlying these psychiatric disorders by characterizing them.
