Misbehaving Mice

You'll never hear Jacki Crawley talk about an 'autistic mouse'. In fact, in her keynote address at IMFAR in May, she implored the audience to never use those two words in the same sentence.Autism, as she rightly points out in a review in the July issue ofNature Reviews Neuroscience, is a uniquely human disorder, with a befuddling number of causal genes and lots of developmental and social complexities.The variety of symptoms makes it difficult even to compare two people with the disorder — so it's somewhat preposterous to compare one to a mouse that cannot speak, gesture or do abstract thinking.There are few — if any — researchers who know these creatures better than Crawley does. Ten years ago, she wrote a much-cited book, What's Wrong With My Mouse?, about how to measure complex behaviors in genetically engineered mice. In the new review, she describes how researchers can use these mice to investigate the brain and the behavioral effects of genes that have been linked to autism or related disorders.Read more at...SFARI, August 2010.