Grant: Project Grant

One in three Canadians experiences a mental illness such as depression during their lifetime. Mental illness disrupts people's lives and costs Canadian society about $51 billion every year. Current treatments are not always effective and can have unwanted side effects. To develop better treatments, we first need to understand how mental illnesses happen. Mental health and sleep-wake cycles are linked. Mutations in genes that control behaviours like sleep-wake cycles (also called "circadian genes") are found in people with different types of mental illnesses. We think that these mutations might help explain how mental illnesses happen. My lab uses fruit flies to study how brain function affects behaviours associated with mental illnesses. We have already discovered that mutations in some circadian genes cause problems in some parts of the brain, but not other parts. This is surprising because the mutations are present in all parts of the brain. When some parts of the brain work normally and other parts do not, it makes it difficult for different parts of the brain to communicate with each other. We believe that it is not the mutations in the genes that cause mental illnesses, but communication problems between the different brain regions. We will study this problem in three ways. (1) We will study how circadian genes process signals from outside of the brain cell to regulate different behaviours. (2) We will study how different regions of the brain work together to control different behaviours. (3) We will study differences in the proteins that control behaviour inside brain cells across brain regions. By studying molecules, brain cells, and behaviours, we will gain a complete picture of how mutations in circadian genes cause patterns of behaviours that are related to mental illnesses. Understanding how mental illnesses occur, from molecules to behaviours, will allow us to develop new therapies.