Mosaike im Gehirn des Menschen

Recently, the human brain has been found to exhibit high levels of somatic mosaicism. On the one hand this has been shown to be age associated, on the other hand mosaicism in the brain was shown to be a mechanism for neurologic and psychiatric disorders (i. e. Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia). Thus, a possibility to use this knowledge for the preclinical diagnosis was proposed. Since correlations between patterns of somatic mosaicism in mitotic cells and in post-mitotic neural cells have been described, one can suggest molecular cytogenetic analysis of somatic genome variations in biopsies to have potential diagnostic importance. Finally, detecting alterations to molecular pathways protecting cells from genome or chromosome instability seems to be another promising way for future diagnostic applications in brain diseases.