Ignacio Morgado
Professor Emeritus of Psychobiology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and full member of the Spanish Academy of Psychology
The set of studies presented here constitutes a valuable and important resource for facilitating the identification of regions and mechanisms of the genome that regulate gene expression according to cell types and stages of brain development that may be related to mental illnesses of unknown nature, such as autism or schizophrenia.The genetic expression in the prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain involved in complex mental tasks, such as reasoning or social behavior, which could be related to mental illness, receives special treatment in one of the works.
As a whole, the published works gather information from thousands of samples and different ages and ethnicities, addressing the difficulty of linking common genetic variations with the susceptibility or risk of developing certain mental illnesses.The results gain systemic value by being part of the PsychENCODE consortium, which, in its nearly 15 years of existence, aims to generate a multiplicity of data on the genetic regulation of the human brain.