Science Essay

Submitted By modernwarfare3
Words: 470
Pages: 2

Summary of Article
This Article is about Tourette syndrome and OCD. Neither Tourette syndrome nor OCD are simple enough to be traced as a single gene. So Jeremiah Scharf a neurologist and his colleagues took charge into narrowing down the Tourette syndrome and OCD. First what is a Tourette syndrome? A Tourette syndrome is a neurological disorder characterized by muscle and vocal tics such as eye blinking, throat, clearing the throat and uttering taboo words or phrases. Second what is OCD? OCD stands for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. OCD is a mental illness marked by repetitive behaviors and anxiety-producing thoughts. To test the Tourette syndrome, Jeremiah Scharf and his colleagues compared the genomes of more than 1,200 people that had this type of disorder with the genomes of nearly 5,000 people that were healthy and didn’t have this problem. The test is called a Genome-Wide Association study. It scans hundreds of thousands genetic variants from across the genomes to check if any were more common in the people with the disorder. The results turned out to be that no single genetic signal was really that much that different between the two genomes tested. In all of the top genetic variations, the researchers found an unusually high number of gene expression in the frontal lobe of the brain, which is an important region in the Tourette syndrome and OCD. In the results out of all the genes, one of them called COL27A1varied the most between Tourette and non-Tourette. The COL27A1 is a gene that contains a collagen protein found in cartilage. That very same gene is in the cerebellum. A cerebellum is an important brain region for motor control during development. Even though a lot is discovered, more research will be needed to find out the rest. Later, the scientist did the same