Funding outcome

Children who have had traumatic or stressful experiences called Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) are more likely to have behavioural disorders. These behaviour problems include anxiety, depression and sleep problems. Importantly, childhood stress reduces their quality of life and productivity into adulthood. However, we do not understand how childhood stress leads to these behaviour problems. Often, brains of children experiencing stress show changes in molecules that help the brain recognize happiness and reward, sometimes called “feel-good hormones”. One of these molecules is dopamine. Dopamine can cause changes to how a brain cell works in humans as well as different research animals used in labs to understand how these molecules function. Using fruit flies, we found that stress also causes a change in a brain cell protein called CLK, which helps the cell express 15% of its genes. Stress related changes to CLK either allow it to, or prevent it from, reacting to molecules like dopamine. Researchers have shown that mutations in CLK change how brain cells work and lead to anxiety, depression, and sleep problems. Since these changes in brain cells looks a lot like changes in children that have had traumatic or stressful experiences, we think that CLK may hold the key to understanding how behavioural problems occur in these children. We believe that by understanding how trauma and stress change brain cells, we can then look for ways to reverse these changes and help reduce behavioural problems in vulnerable children.