Author(s): Shaunna S. Berkovitch, Jonathan Iaconelli, and Rakesh Karmacharya
The advent of somatic cell reprogramming has provided a remarkable opportunity for neuropsychiatric research. Acquiring biological data on disorders of the central nervous system was previously restricted to studies on postmortem tissue and animal models of questionable validity. Now that neurons can be formed in a dish starting from patient fibroblasts, it is possible to generate cell culture models that may capture the biology of psychiatric disorders. For genetically complex and heterogeneous disorders like schizophrenia (SCZ), this means that the genetic background of a patient may be captured without necessarily knowing exactly which genetic variants are contributing to that person’s illness.