Dr. Sergiu Pașcă

So they will never eat, for instance, veggies.

So that creates in the early days, for instance, we thought that there are dietary disturbances that really at the core.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether just simply correcting those is going to be just improving or certainly improving.

reversing some of these forms.

But again, most of the evidence points out towards a very strong genetic component behind it.

And in fact, we now have hundreds of genes that we know when they are mutated, they are strongly associated with specific forms of autism.

Yeah, absolutely.

And those are really elegant experiments that he's done.

Many of the genes, you know, they fit in different categories.

Like you would have genes that would produce proteins that sit at synapses, which was sort of like to be expected.

Some of them are, you know, ion channels.

They're proteins that would let ions inside or outside of a neuron.

There are many of these conditions, so-called channelopathies.

Then there are the ones that are like synaptic related, so synaptopathies.

There are a lot of chromatin genes, so like proteins that pack the DNA in cells.

Those are chromatinopathies.

So there are really, again, many, many categories of genes.

And then what is also interesting is that many of these genes are also expressed in the periphery.

So I think the experiments that you are mentioning are really elegant.

because it showed that indeed that can perturb the development of the nervous system, even if they're affecting just the periphery.