© Brandon Laufenberg/GettyMice displaying symptoms of autism are less social and more anxious than control animals.
Doses of a human gut microbe helped to reverse behavioural problems in mice with autism-like symptoms, researchers report today in
Cell1. The treatment also reduced gastrointestinal problems in the animals that were similar to those that often accompany autism in humans.
The work builds on previous research by Paul Patterson, a neurobiologist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. In 2012, he and his team created mice with autism-like symptoms by injecting a chemical that
mimics viral infection into pregnant mice; those animals then bore offspring that were less sociable and more anxious than wild-type animals
2. The autistic mice also had 'leaky guts', in which the walls of the intestine break down and allow substances to leak through. Several studies have found that humans with autism are also more likely to have gastrointestinal disorders, suggesting that the two problems may be linked
3.
To investigate what role the gut might play in the animals' symptoms, Patterson and his Caltech colleagues - microbiologist Sarkis Mazmanian and neuroscientist Elaine Hsiao - took a census of the bacteria living in the guts of the mice. They found that mice with symptoms of autism had lower levels of a bacterium called
Bacteroides fragilis that is normally present in the mouse gut. When the researchers fed B. fragilis to these mice, the animals began behaving more normally and their gastrointestinal symptoms improved.
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