![]() ![]() “Mice are great for a lot of things,” Platt says, “but to study social behavior, you really have to study primates.”įrom the earliest days of medical science, rats and mice have been the top testing ground for lifesaving vaccines and treatments. A handful of other such transgenic monkeys have recently been engineered for autism research, promising insight into genetic influences on brain development and, potentially, a new platform for testing drugs that influence social behavior. Platt’s work has focused on the descendants of wild macaques on Cayo Santiago and in his Philadelphia lab, but he also has plans to study transgenic macaques in China whose genomes have been modified with a man-made mutation in SHANK3 along with the top autism gene, CHD8. These differences may explain why the majority of clinical trials for neurological drugs based on mouse studies have failed. Mice don’t form societies, and the critical bond between mother and child concludes at weaning. The result has been that most autism research is conducted using rodents as models.īut Platt and other researchers have begun to draw attention to the limitations that come with that mouse-sized package, namely that rodent brains are different from our own. Many consider it unethical to conduct research - invasive or not - on primates. Monkeys are not the most convenient research animals: They are expensive to raise and take a long time to study. Over the next five years, he hopes to bring monkeys with natural or engineered genetic variants into the laboratory, probing their atypical brains and testing drugs in experiments that would be impossible to conduct with people.Ī decade ago, few in the research community would have anticipated that some of the most intriguing advances in understanding autism might come from feral monkeys on a Caribbean island. In 2007, Platt launched a wide-ranging research effort here to elucidate the role that genes and the environment play in shaping these animals’ social lives. It’s too early to tell.įriend me: Some monkeys, like 41N here, follow unusual social patterns - and carry a gene variant linked to autism. That may be because they’re not skilled at reading social cues, or because they simply choose to find friends outside the norm. Instead of joining a pre-existing social clique, they form relationships with monkeys that don’t necessarily spend time with one another, creating a bridge between cliques. Rather, they are more adventurous when it comes to picking their friends. The social butterflies, for instance, spend time with other social butterflies - forming a popular in-group.Ĥ1N and his ilk are neither more nor less gregarious than run-of-the-mill macaques. They have formed six tightly knit groups, and within those groups there are defined pecking orders. The monkeys, slightly larger than house cats, make friends, raise families and mourn the loss of their loved ones. The primate population density here rivals that of the New York City metropolitan area. The island was first stocked with macaques from India for medical research in the late 1930s, and now has more than 1,500 crammed into an area the size of around eight city blocks. Most traditional research colonies would have weeded out uncooperative monkeys or ones with behavioral issues, but the monkeys here are left to themselves. What makes Cayo Santiago special is that it is a haven for social diversity. “Are those autistic monkeys?” Platt says, immediately answering his own question with a scientist’s allergy to hype: “I don’t know.” As in people, a disruption of this gene affects the monkeys’ social lives. About 1 percent of people with autism have a mutation in SHANK3 on Cayo Santiago, potentially one out of every eight monkeys possesses this SHANK3 variant. This gene codes for a protein that strengthens the connections between neurons. ![]() 41N is one of 40 macaques on Cayo Santiago that Platt’s group identified last year as carrying a naturally occurring variant of a gene called SHANK3. Because March is the breeding season here on Cayo Santiago - Puerto Rico’s so-called ‘Monkey Island’ - his face and genitals are tinted a garish coral hue.įor Michael Platt, a neuroscientist who is normally stuck in his lab at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, this moment was the first time he was able to match a face to a gene. The gray hair on his chest hides his identifying tattoo, but this 16-year-old rhesus macaque is hard to mistake: He has freckles on his face and smears of red extending horizontally from his eyes like war paint. When he hears us approaching, he looks up from the ground and smacks his lips as though he has peanut butter on the roof of his mouth. 41N sits alone under the waxy leaves of a bay rum tree. ![]()
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