People pay for having a big brain

Metabolic transformation responsible for our unique cognitive ability evolution indicates that the brain may have been pushed to the limit of its ability. The study, published in Genome Biology, adds weight to the hypothesis that schizophrenia is the harmful end product of the evolution of the human brain.

Philipp Khaitovich of the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Shanghai's Quick Branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences directed a group of researchers from Cambridge, Leipzig and Shanghai. They studied the brains of healthy people and people with schizophrenia and then compared their brains to brown monkey brains and chimpanzees. Khaitovich explains the researchers looking for differences in gene expression as well as the concentration of metabolites, as well as ' molecular mechanisms found to be involved in the evolution of human cognitive abilities by how to combine biological data from two research directions is evolution and medicine '.

Schizophrenia is a by-product of the evolution of the human brain.(Photo: downbeast)

The idea is that certain neurological diseases are a by-product of the phenomenon of increased metabolic capacity as well as brain size that occurred during human evolution that has previously been proposed. But in this new study, the authors used new techniques to put the hypothesis into practice.

They identified the molecular transformation that occurred during human evolution and calculated the molecular changes observed in schizophrenia - a mental disorder that was given is influencing cognitive functions such as language ability and complex social relationships. They found that the expression level of many genes as well as modified metabolites in cases of schizophrenia, especially those related to energy exchange, also changed rapidly in the past. evolution. According to Khaitovich, 'new research shows that different mental illnesses are a byproduct of increasing metabolic demands during human evolution'.

The authors concluded that the study paved the way for many other detailed studies. 'Our brain is very special compared to all species for its enormous metabolic needs. If we can explain how our brain maintains intense metabolic flow, we will have a good chance of understanding how the brain works as well as why it sometimes stops '

Quote: Metabolic changes in schizophrenia and human brain evolution;Philipp Khaitovich, Helen E Lockstone, Matthew T Wayland, Tsz M Tsang, Samantha D Jayatilaka, Arfu J Guo, Jie Zhou, Mehmet Somel, Laura W Harris, Elaine Holmes, Svante Paabo and Sabine Bahn;Genome Biology 'in press'