Here, we employed a valproic acid (VPA) rat model of autism to investigate the autism-like behaviors and GABAergic glutamic acid decarboxylase 67 (GAD67) expression underlying these altered behaviors in multiple brain areas at different developmental stages from birth to adulthood.
We cannot exclude neither GAD1 as a susceptibility gene nor the possibility of another susceptibility gene for autism to be located on chromosome 2q31.
The National Institutes of Health imaging system showed that expression of GAD67 mRNA in basket cells was significantly up-regulated, by 28%, in eight autistic brains compared with that in eight control brains (mean +/- SEM pixels per cell, 1.03 +/- 0.05 versus 0.69 +/- 0.05, respectively; P < 0.0001 by independent t test).
The level of GAD67 mRNA, one of the isoforms of the key synthesizing enzymes for GABA, was quantified at the single-cell level using in situ hybridization in brains of autistic and aged-matched controls.