Grant: Operating Grant: SickKids-CIHR-IHDCYH New Investigator Grants

Social behaviour, including how we communicate and interact with peers, is at once necessary for survival and intrinsic to our identity. Neurodevelopmental disorders featuring social deficits, such as autism spectrum disorders (ASD), have their onset in early childhood, and lead to devastating consequences to children which often last their lifetime. Multiple lines of research point to conserved brain regions associated with social processing, such as prefrontal cortex, ventral tegmental area, and nucleus accumbens, as also being implicated in ASD symptomatology. Still, the biological mechanisms underlying the contribution of these brain regions to ASD onset and progression is unclear. Remarkably, even though ASD has its onset during early life, very little is known about how social brain circuits function during early development to support the emergence of social behaviour, and even less about how this maturation is affected in ASD patients. Here, we will use a combination of optogenetics and electrophysiology to (1) elucidate the maturation of synaptic transmission within isolated brain circuits underlying social behaviour, and (2) determine how this activity is altered in an animal model of ASD. This circuit-based approach will advance our understanding of the biological mechanisms of ASD in three ways. First, it will identify biological factors critically necessary to support social function, which might be disrupted in ASD and other neurodevelopmental disorders marked by social deficits. Second, examining circuit activity in a model of ASD will pave the way to the development of novel age- and circuit-based therapeutic approaches and diagnostic tools to combat this devastating disorder. Third, this will identify critical periods in which social brain circuits are more susceptible to external influence. Targeting clinical interventions to these critical periods of increased plasticity will maximize their impact on child health, significantly improving the lives of ASD patients and their families.