Stuttering mice provide insight
5 May 2016 by Evoluted New Media
Scientists have given mice a genetic mutation causing them to stutter to better understand the speech disorder in humans.
Scientists have given mice a genetic mutation causing them to stutter to better understand the speech disorder in humans.
Previous research had identified mutations in a gene called GNPTAB, which was a surprise as the gene was thought to only be responsible for actions such as the digestion of waste inside cells in the body. Dr Terra Barnes, from Washington University and her team, using an algorithm, found mice with the mutation produced nearly a third less sounds with longer pauses in between noises made.
Dr Tim Holy, senior author and associate professor of neuroscience at Washington University, said: “Speech is obviously a unique human capacity, but the patterns of speech are built out of a lot of building blocks that are much simpler. You have to be able to control the timing of your breath and the fine muscles in your tongue and mouth. You have to be able to initiate movement. Those kinds of things may be shared all the way from mice to people.”
The same algorithm was applied to recordings of people talking, some that suffered from stuttering and some that did not. It was able to distinguish people who were able to speak fluently from those who stuttered. As seen in people that stutter, mice with the GNPTAB mutation repeated the same syllable more.
Dr Holy said: “One of the things we find scientifically interesting about stuttering is that it is so precisely limited to speech. It’s a very clean defect in an incredibly complex task.”
The study was published in Current Biology.
