Date: March 28, 2018
Source: University of California - Los Angeles
Summary:
Insights into how songbirds learn
to sing provide promising clues about human speech disorders and may lead to
new ways of treating them, according to new research published in the
journal eLife.
There are about 9,000 species of
birds, about half of which are songbirds. When these birds sing, the activity
of a master gene called FoxP2 declines in a key region of the brain involved in
vocal control known as Area X. The decrease in FoxP2 produces changes in the
activity of thousands of other genes.
FoxP2 also plays an important
role in speech in humans. Stephanie White, a UCLA professor of integrative
biology and physiology and senior author of the study, thinks FoxP2 and the
changes it causes could be a part of the molecular basis for vocal learning. In
both humans and birds, cells process this gene in a way that produces both a
full-length protein and a shorter version of the protein. The long version
regulates other genes; what the short version does remains a mystery. Humans
with a mutation in the long version have problems with their speech.
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