Do you have a rat or mouse you've induced neurological symptoms in? It might be COMT!

 

Hey you! Have you drugged or poisoned or mutated a mouse or rat so that it induces Parkinson's Disease (PD) or schizophrenia (SC) symptoms in? Do you want to fix it? 

Do I ever have a veterinary drug target for you! Check out this new paper! 

DISCLAIMERS! DO NOT, DO NOT, DO NOT ATTEMPT TO EXTEND THESE OBSERVATIONS TO HUMANS. That would be silly for the following reasons: 

Rodents have SUPERCHARGED COMT proteins. Not only do they primarily produce a variant of COMT that is the very active form (there are two in humans), but even the very active form in mice has a key single amino acid variant (compared to the active human form) in it that makes it run in super overdrive at all time (when compared to humans, for sure)

As you might or might not be aware, a rodent brain and a human brain have a lot of other differences. One of the reasons SC models in mice haven't worked very well is that...well....a lot of the proteins implicated in SC don't exist in mice. Not a few. A lot. And there are entire pathways in the mouse brain that humans have evolved completely opposite mechanisms for. For real, people have put years into studying phosphorylation cascades in mice that are completely and totally irrelevant in human beings. However, if your ultimate goal is to cure a disease that occurs largely in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in an organism that doesn't....have one.... there is a whole lot of proteomics done here that you can totally check out! I think the proteomics is actually good. 😇😇😇 I think the attempt to extend the findings in this study to be relevant to humans is....a...stretch....