Premium
Modelling the genetic contribution to mental illness: a timely end for the psychiatric rodent?
Author(s) -
Davis Brittany A.,
Isles Anthony R.
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
european journal of neuroscience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.346
H-Index - 206
eISSN - 1460-9568
pISSN - 0953-816X
DOI - 10.1111/ejn.12607
Subject(s) - mental illness , genomics , psychology , psychiatry , psychiatric genetics , omics , epigenomics , data science , bioinformatics , mental health , biology , schizophrenia (object oriented programming) , computer science , genome , genetics , gene , gene expression , dna methylation
Abstract Rodent models are a key factor in the process of translating psychiatric genetics and genomics findings, allowing us to shed light on how risk‐genes confer changes in neurobiology by merging different types of data across fields, from behavioural neuroscience to the burgeoning omics (e.g. genomics, epigenomics, proteomics, etc.). Moreover, they also provide an indispensable first step for drug discovery. However, recent evidence from both clinical and genetic studies highlights possible limitations in the current methods for classifying psychiatric illness, as both symptomology and underlying genetic risk are found to increasingly overlap across disorder diagnoses. Meanwhile, integration of data from animal models across disorders is currently limited. Here, we argue that behavioural neuroscience is in danger of missing informative data because of the practice of trying to ‘diagnose’ an animal model with a psychiatric illness. What is needed is a shift in emphasis, from seeking to ally an animal model to a specific disorder, to one focused on a more systematic assessment of the neurobiological and behavioural outcomes of any given genetic or environmental manipulation.