(Press-News.org) What makes the human brain distinctive? A new study published July 21 in Cell identifies two genes linked to human brain features and provides a road map to discover many more. The research could lead to insights into the functioning and evolution of the human brain, as well as the roots of language disorders and autism.
The newly characterized genes are found among the “dark matter” of the human genome: regions of DNA that contain a lot of duplicated or repeat sequences, making them difficult to study until recently. If assembling a DNA sequence is like putting together a book from torn-up pages, reconstructing it from repeat sequences would be like trying to match pages using only words like “and” and “the.” There are many opportunities for mismatches and overlap.
Although difficult to study, DNA repeats are also thought to be important for evolution as they can generate new versions of existing genes for selection to act on.
“Historically, this has been a very challenging problem. People don’t know where to start,” said senior author Megan Dennis, associate director of genomics at the UC Davis Genome Center and associate professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine and MIND Institute at the University of California, Davis.
In 2022, Dennis was a coauthor on a paper describing the first sequence of a complete human genome, known as the ‘telomere to telomere’ reference genome. This referencencludes the difficult regions that had been left out of the first draft published in 2001 and is now being used to make new discoveries.
Identifying human brain genes
Dennis and colleagues used the telomere-to-telomere human genome to identify duplicated genes. Then, they sorted those for genes that are: expressed in the brain; found in all humans, based on sequences from the 1000 Genomes Project; and conserved, meaning that they did not show much variation among individuals.
They came out with about 250 candidate gene families. Of these, they picked some for further study in an animal model, the zebrafish. By both deleting genes and introducing human-duplicated genes into zebrafish, they showed that at least two of these genes might contribute to features of the human brain: one called GPR89B led to slightly bigger brain size, and another, FRMPD2B, led to altered synapse signaling.
“It’s pretty cool to think that you can use fish to test a human brain trait,” Dennis said.
The dataset in the Cell paper is intended to be a resource for the scientific community, Dennis said. It should make it easier to screen duplicated regions for mutations, for example related to language deficits or autism, that have been missed in previous genome-wide screening.
“It opens up new areas,” Dennis said.
Additional coauthors on the work are: Daniela Soto, José Uribe-Salazar, Gulhan Kaya, Ricardo Valdarrago, Aarthi Sekar, Nicholas Haghani, Keiko Hino, Gabriana La, Natasha Ann Mariano, Cole Ingamells, Aidan Baraban, Zoeb Jamal, Sergi Simó and Gerald Quon, all at UC Davis; Tychele Turner, Washington University St. Louis; Eric Green, National Human Genome Research Institute, Bethesda, Md.; and Aida Andrés, University College, London.
The work was supported in part by grants from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and The Wellcome Trust.
END
Finding human brain genes in duplicated DNA
2025-07-21
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
SwRI experiments may explain mysterious distribution of hydrogen peroxide on Europa
2025-07-21
SAN ANTONIO — July 21, 2025 — Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) scientists conducted lab experiments to address a mystery about the origins of frozen hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. Their results, published in the July 2025 issue of Planetary Science Journal, may help explain puzzling observations made by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
Scientists studying the telescope data noticed elevated levels of hydrogen peroxide on Europa in unexpected areas. Decades of lab studies suggested higher concentrations ...
New research reveals how autistic teens’ brains respond in some social settings, helping them ‘pass’ as non-autistic
2025-07-21
Some autistic teens often adopt behaviors to mask their diagnosis in social settings helping them be perceived — or “pass” — as non-autistic. For the first time, researchers are able to observe brain functions that differ in those who “pass as non-autistic,” which could lead to a better understanding of the cognitive toll of this kind of masking, and of how these individuals could be more effectively supported.
Using an electroencephalogram (EEG) to measure brainwaves, researchers from Drexel University’s A.J. Drexel Autism Institute found that teens who pass as non-autistic ...
GLP-1 drugs fail to provide key long-term health benefit
2025-07-21
Popular GLP-1 drugs help many people drop tremendous amounts of weight, but the drugs fail to provide a key improvement in heart and lung function essential for long-term good health, University of Virginia experts warn in a new paper.
The researchers emphasize that weight loss associated with GLP-1 drugs has many clear health benefits for people with obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart failure, including improving blood-sugar control, short-term cardiorenal benefits and improvements in survival outcomes. But doctors may need to consider recommending exercise programs or develop other approaches, such as nutrition supplements or complementary medications, to help ...
FloodPlanet dataset enhances global inundation monitoring
2025-07-21
A new high-resolution flood dataset, FloodPlanet, is enhancing satellite-based flood monitoring through more accurate training of deep learning models. By manually labeling inundation data from commercial satellites and aligning them with public sensor imagery, researchers improved flood detection accuracy by up to 15.6%. This work addresses critical limitations in current flood mapping and opens the door for more reliable global inundation response systems.
Flooding affects more people globally than any other environmental hazard, yet accurate ...
Focus in flashes: How the brain handles overload
2025-07-21
Recent research shows that your brain doesn’t pay attention in one smooth stream—instead, it switches focus in quick bursts, about 8 times per second. This process, called “attentional sampling,” helps your brain deal with too much information by jumping back and forth between different things you're seeing. It’s kind of like your brain is taking rapid snapshots instead of watching a constant video. And when you need to focus on more than one thing, the rhythm splits to allow focusing on each one around 4 times ...
Breaking the crystalline barrier: Amorphous nanomaterials in advanced photocatalysis
2025-07-21
Photocatalysis, a technology that converts solar energy into chemical reactions, holds immense promise for addressing energy shortages and environmental pollution. However, traditional crystalline semiconductors face limitations in efficiency and stability. A groundbreaking review led by researchers from China Three Gorges University and Capital Normal University unveils how amorphous nanomaterials, which are lacking of long-range atomic order, could overcome these barriers and provide a new thought of advanced photocatalysis.
Published in Nano Research, the ...
SwRI’s Sidney Chocron named Ballistics Science Fellow
2025-07-21
SAN ANTONIO — July 21, 2025 —Southwest Research Institute’s (SwRI) Dr. Sidney Chocron has been named a Ballistic Science Fellow by the International Ballistics Society. The honor is awarded to members who have made numerous contributions to ballistics science.
Chocron specializes in the nonlinear response of materials under high strain rates. His work primarily focuses on unconventional tests and computer modeling of materials, such as his research studying the impact of foam and ice on the Space Shuttle thermal protection ...
Turning waste alkaline water directly into clean hydrogen!
2025-07-21
Dr. Sung Mook Choi and his research team at the Energy & Environmental Materials Research Division of the Korea Institute of Materials Science (KIMS) have successfully developed a highly durable non-precious metal-based hydrogen evolution catalyst for use in a direct electrolysis system employing waste alkaline water and anion exchange membranes (AEM). This breakthrough enables the production of clean hydrogen by directly utilizing alkaline wastewater generated from industrial processes. Notably, the developed catalyst was applied to a commercial-scale ...
Astronomers witness newborn planet sculpting the dust around it
2025-07-21
Astronomers may have caught a still-forming planet in action, carving out an intricate pattern in the gas and dust that surrounds its young host star. Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), they observed a planetary disc with prominent spiral arms, finding clear signs of a planet nestled in its inner regions. This is the first time astronomers have detected a planet candidate embedded inside a disc spiral.
“We will never witness the formation of Earth, but here, around a young star 440 light-years away, we may be watching a planet come into existence in real time,” says Francesco Maio, a doctoral researcher at the University of Florence, Italy, ...
AI vision, reinvented: The power of synthetic data
2025-07-21
In the race to develop AI that understands complex images like financial forecasts, medical diagrams and nutrition labels — essential for AI to operate independently in everyday settings — closed-source systems like ChatGPT and Claude currently set the pace. But no one outside their makers knows how those models were trained or what data they used, leaving open-source alternatives scrambling to catch up.
Now, researchers at Penn Engineering and the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) have developed a new approach to train open-source models: using AI to create scientific figures, charts and tables that teach other AI systems ...