OA research in the news: Zebrafish offer clues to autism

Researchers led by biologist Hazel Sive are using zebrafish to help learn about the biological mechanisms behind human brain disorders like autism. In a recent paper published in the open access journal Disease Models and Mechanisms, Sive and her colleagues describe looking at a set of genes that are the same across species; deletions and duplications of the genes in humans have been associated with autism. When they silenced the genes in the fish, they found abnormal brain development. “That’s really the goal — to go from an animal that shares molecular pathways, but doesn’t get autistic behaviors, into humans who have the same pathways and do show these behaviors,” Sive told the MIT News.

Explore Professor Sive’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.

Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of blog posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.