Home » Mind & Soul » Depression » Alphabet Soup

Alphabet Soup

© John McManamy

"Somewhere is a "t" that should have been an "a" or some other minor typographical error capable of bringing down our brains."

Go to the NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information website and enter GRK3 into the search field. GRK3 is a protein involved in regulating our neurotransmitters, including dopamine. A lack of dialogue between the gene responsible for GRK3 and GRK3 itself - along with other genetic, biological, and environmental factors - may possibly contribute to bipolar, source of untold millions of depressions. Searching for GRK3 gives you the protein's corresponding gene, ADRBK2, standing for adrenergic, beta, receptor kinase 2, whose position on the human genome is 22q12.1.

The 22 stands for chromosome 22, a stubby little strand of DNA that seems lost in the redwoods of most of the other 23 chromosomes. Go back to the page you started from and click on this little fella and you will be taken to an enlarged diagram that tells you 238 genes are present in the region, 20 which have been accounted for. Seven down from the top, isolated from the other genes, is ADRBK2. Click on AV for Ace View, which gives you detailed and contextual diagrams of the gene, then click Details and DNA, and there you have it, the four-letter alphabet soup that stands for this segment of DNA, starting with gcccccc ... and ending a thousand symbols later in ttccagac.

Somewhere in our own personal arrangements of those one thousand letters which may very well govern my sanity and yours is a "t" that should have been an "a" or a "g" that should have been a "c" or some other minor typographical error that is possibly capable of bringing down our brains with a resounding almighty crash.

The simple solution, once we've pinpointed the culprit genes, seems to be to find a way to flip the letters back to where they're supposed to be, or to replace bad genes with good genes, but it's not as simple as all that, says Gary Stix, an editor at Scientific American. Writing in the LA Times, he reports that, "scientists have encountered great difficulty in delivering genes where they are needed in the body and triggering their activation in cells."

Instead of genes, Stix argues, it's the proteins, stupid, and here life gets a lot more complicated. We may have sequenced the human genome, but no one has come up with a map of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. We now know there are about 30,000 genes in the human genome, but there may be as many as a million proteins dispersed along 100 billion human cells, and

The copyright of the article Alphabet Soup in Depression is owned by Kathy Brewis. Permission to republish Alphabet Soup in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.