Michale E. Keeling Center for Comparative Medicine and Research, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Bastrop, Texas, USA.
Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology, Department of Anthropology, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA.
Autism Res. 2023 Apr;16(4):713-722. doi: 10.1002/aur.2895. Epub 2023 Feb 4.
Joint attention (JA) is an important milestone in human infant development and is predictive of the onset of language later in life. Clinically, it has been reported that children at risk for or with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) perform more poorly on measures of JA compared to neurotypical controls. JA is not unique to humans but has also been reported in great apes and to a lesser extent in more distantly related monkeys. Further, individual differences in JA among chimpanzees are associated with polymorphisms in the vasopressin and oxytocin genes, AVPR1A and OXTR. Here, we tested whether individual variation in DNA methylation of OXTR and AVPR1A were associated with performance on JA tasks in chimpanzees. We found that individual differences in JA performance was associated with AVPR1A methylation, but not OXTR methylation in the chimpanzees. The collective results provide further evidence of the role of AVPR1A in JA abilities in chimpanzees. The results further suggest that methylation values for AVPR1A may be useful biomarkers for identifying individuals at risk for ASD or related neurodevelopmental disorders associated with impairments in JA abilities.
共同注意力（JA）是人类婴儿发育的一个重要里程碑，也是日后语言发展的预测指标。临床上，据报道，与神经典型对照组相比，有自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）风险或被诊断为 ASD 的儿童在 JA 测量方面表现更差。JA 并非人类所特有，在大型猿类中也有报道，在亲缘关系更远的猴子中则较少见。此外，黑猩猩之间 JA 的个体差异与血管加压素和催产素基因（AVPR1A 和 OXTR）的多态性有关。在这里，我们测试了 OXTR 和 AVPR1A 的 DNA 甲基化个体差异是否与黑猩猩 JA 任务的表现相关。我们发现，JA 表现的个体差异与 AVPR1A 甲基化有关，但与 OXTR 甲基化无关。这些结果为 AVPR1A 在黑猩猩 JA 能力中的作用提供了进一步的证据。结果进一步表明，AVPR1A 的甲基化值可能是识别有 ASD 风险或与 JA 能力受损相关的神经发育障碍的有用生物标志物。
