Fig. 5: New advance in the old model: the impact of ERV activation on autism susceptibility by driving host genome evolution and invading ISR pathway. | Molecular Psychiatry

Fig. 5: New advance in the old model: the impact of ERV activation on autism susceptibility by driving host genome evolution and invading ISR pathway.

From: An old model with new insights: endogenous retroviruses drive the evolvement toward ASD susceptibility and hijack transcription machinery during development

Fig. 5

Hyper-activation of ancient retroviral infection accelerates host genome evolution toward ASD susceptibility by increasing the chance of CNV formation. The accumulated genetic variations lead to the divergence of autistic-like behaviors in both BTBR strains. Active ERV also recapitulates the viral infection process of ISR pathway invasion and IRES-mediated translation, which changes the global transcriptome during embryonic development in BTBR mice. BTBR/R has severer core symptoms of autism and wildtype Draxin expression, which suggests BTBR/R is a valid autism model with unaffected forebrain bundles.

Back to article page