Singing Mice – Help

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Ambience: Mouse song slowed down

This sound could be a key to understanding another piece of the mystery of the human brain. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet. We’re listening to the sounds of a male mouse vocalizing. Because it is repetitive and somewhat complex, scientists often refer to it as “song.” We’ve slowed these ultrasonic vibrations down so that we can hear them. Dr. Timothy Holy is a professor of neurobiology at Washington University in St. Louis.

“Often bird song is studied as a model of human speech and trying to understand how speech is produced, what are the mechanisms for that. Or how it’s perceived, so understanding the auditory pathways in the brain. And birdsong is studied in the hopes that it will reveal interesting things about that process. In all of those respects, there are certain kinds of things that might be easier to do in a mouse. We have the ability to manipulate the genes in a mouse in a way that we really can’t yet do in birds. And so, there’re also maybe more similarities between mouse brains and human brains. This I think is a long term hope, but it’s one that we’re actually pursuing in collaborations right now-is the hope that mouse song will be a model for some of the interesting behaviors that humans do, in particular speech. There is a growing understanding, for instance, that certain genes play a role in human speech disorders like autism. And we and mice share most of those genes. And so, there’s an interest in the community, I think, in manipulating those genes now in a mouse. And seeing the consequences. And there’s already, for instance, one example of a gene that’s deficient in certain human families with a hereditary speech disorder that, when you disrupt that gene in a mouse, it eliminates the vocalizations; it eliminates these songs. And we can study in a mouse what’s wrong with their brain in a much more direct way than we can in a human. And we can test treatments and medications in a mouse.”

Pulse of the Planet is made possible by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.

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Singing Mice - Help

Scientists searching for the origin of certain speech disorders are listening to mice!
Air Date:10/10/2006
Scientist:
Transcript:

Music

Ambience: Mouse song slowed down

This sound could be a key to understanding another piece of the mystery of the human brain. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet. We're listening to the sounds of a male mouse vocalizing. Because it is repetitive and somewhat complex, scientists often refer to it as "song." We've slowed these ultrasonic vibrations down so that we can hear them. Dr. Timothy Holy is a professor of neurobiology at Washington University in St. Louis.

"Often bird song is studied as a model of human speech and trying to understand how speech is produced, what are the mechanisms for that. Or how it's perceived, so understanding the auditory pathways in the brain. And birdsong is studied in the hopes that it will reveal interesting things about that process. In all of those respects, there are certain kinds of things that might be easier to do in a mouse. We have the ability to manipulate the genes in a mouse in a way that we really can't yet do in birds. And so, there're also maybe more similarities between mouse brains and human brains. This I think is a long term hope, but it's one that we're actually pursuing in collaborations right now-is the hope that mouse song will be a model for some of the interesting behaviors that humans do, in particular speech. There is a growing understanding, for instance, that certain genes play a role in human speech disorders like autism. And we and mice share most of those genes. And so, there's an interest in the community, I think, in manipulating those genes now in a mouse. And seeing the consequences. And there's already, for instance, one example of a gene that's deficient in certain human families with a hereditary speech disorder that, when you disrupt that gene in a mouse, it eliminates the vocalizations; it eliminates these songs. And we can study in a mouse what's wrong with their brain in a much more direct way than we can in a human. And we can test treatments and medications in a mouse."

Pulse of the Planet is made possible by the National Science Foundation. I'm Jim Metzner.

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