Repositori URV

Identifier: TDX:1614

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TDX1614

Authors:
Roig Bourgine, Bàrbara

Abstract:
Schizophrenia is one of the most common psychoses in the world today. It has a prevalence of 1% in the population and is of unknown etiology. One of the most widely accepted etiopathogenic hypotheses for schizophrenia is neurodevelopmental theory, which postulates that schizophrenia originates from a variety of neurogenetic and gliogenetic disorders during perinatal development. Many studies have reported that schizophrenic patients have alterations in their myelin (white matter of the brain). Axons must be myelinated if signals are to be properly transmitted between neurons. The cells that form the myelin sheaths of the axons in the CNS are the oligodendrocytes.In humans, the myelination process peaks in the perinatal, childhood and adolescence stages. It is during this last stage that the symptoms of schizophrenia become manifest. Several linkage studies indicate that the 6p chromosomal region may contain one or more susceptibility genes for schizophrenia. Our group chose a gene in this region, the gene encoding the discoidin domain receptor 1 (DDR1), as a candidate gene for schizophrenia.DDR1 is known to be a receptor tyrosine kinase which is highly expressed in proliferative areas during murine brain development, and has also been shown to be expressed in human brain. The DDR1 ligand is collagen, which promotes the proliferation and differentiation of the neurophitelial cells in rats. Our group has observed that DDR1 is significantly expressed in the white matter and particularly in oligodendrocytes during pre- and postnatal development in mice. Furthermore, the expression of this receptor follows a spatial-temporal pattern similar to the process of myelination.In this doctoral thesis we have made the first detailed study of the pattern of gene and protein expressio