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About 2% of the world’s population has obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Previous research has pointed toward a defect involving the striatum, a part of the basal ganglia. A multinational team investigated a molecule, SAPAP3, that is expressed at excitatory synapses in the striatum.
First, the team created mice in which the gene for SAPAP3 was knocked out. The resulting mice appeared anxious and developed compulsive grooming behavior, excessive enough to cause skin lesions. The behavior was relieved by treatment with a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI). Most impressive, when the team used genetic engineering techniques to insert the gene for SAPAP3 back into the striatum in mice not treated with SSRIs, the anxiety and compulsi…