Scientists in Shanghai make monkeys with autism, observations underway

In order to better observe the impact of the neurodevelopment disorder on the structure of the brain, autism was genetically introduced in monkeys by a team from the Institute of Neuroscience of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

In addition, two of the monkeys reportedly grew “severely sick” in a way that “echoed” the conditions of autistic human children.

To create the transgenic monkeys, Qiu and his colleagues injected a virus containing multiple copies of the MeCP2 gene into the undeveloped eggs of macaque monkeys, fertilized the eggs, and implanted the 53 resulting embryos into 18 female surrogate monkeys. The team is now imaging the brains of the monkeys, he said, “trying to identify the deficiency in the brain circuits that is responsible for the autismlike behavior”.

Researchers in China believe that they have developed a lineage of monkeys who have their own version of autism. Researchers have to closely monitor a variety of behaviors in the animals, she said, and so far the authors of the new study have focused on “very, very, very basic behavioral measures”.

A gene called MeCP2 was already implicated in the development of Rett Syndrome and MeCP2 Duplication Syndrome, diseases which shares numerous symptoms of autism.

The team launched a battery of behavioral tests, which showed that all of the monkeys had at least one autism-like symptom, such as repetitive or asocial behavior, and that the symptoms were more severe in males, as seen in people with the MECP2 duplications.

The monkeys seem to have rather similar mental abilities to other monkeys, while key differences lie in their behaviors – the animals seem to partake in repetitive behaviors, like going around in circles, and they also seem to engage far less social behaviors than their normal counterparts. “This allows us to study autism-related changes in the brains more similar to human brains and provide unique insights to the neural mechanisms for autism”, Qiu said.

Doctors and scientists are still attempting to understand the root causes of autism. “Decades of research using mice that do not [mimic features of the syndrome as closely as possible] resulted in a lot of research that can’t be translated, so it is important that we hold same standards to non-human primate models”. But this still wasn’t enough to be sure that the monkeys were a sound model of autism – and a paper that the team submitted for publication in 2013 was rejected. “Is this model like the human disease?” They are also considering new genome-editing technologies, such as CRISPR, he says.

Genetically engineering monkeys is much more costly and time-consuming than making transgenic mice, said Dr. Anthony Chan, whose research involves transgenic Huntington’s disease monkeys at Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta.

Case in point, seizures have been absent in the monkeys, and their circling quirk isn’t actually seen with humans.

A group of Chinese researchers say that they managed to produce the most realistic representation of an animal affected by autism spectrum disorder.