Behavior changes due to RNA A-to-I editing

The brain is an ever-changing organ that encodes memories and directs behavior. Neuroanatomical studies have revealed the structural plasticity of neural architecture. Advances in gene expression technology and epigenetics have demonstrated new mechanisms underlying the brain`s dynamic nature.
In order to enable complex systems to emerge, eukaryotic life forms have developed several types of post-transcriptional modifications to their transcriptome. These modifications created layers of possible regulation to the transcripts, thus, controlling their functions in various ways. RNA editing, the process of changing the genomic content in a transcript, is a prevalent form of such post-transcriptional modification. In this work, we propose that RNA editing is one of the mechanisms that can explain a behavior change. To explore this option, we focused on the parasite "Toxoplasma gondii". Since the sexual development of the T. gondii happens optimally in cats, it change the behavioral fear response of the mouse that hosts the parasite. Indeed, we found that infected mice show increased A to I Editing levels in their cortex tissue. In addition, initial results suggested that edited mRNA are linked to genes related to behavioral fear response and behavioral defense response. Taken together we suggest that our results support the idea that RNA editing is involved in behavior changes.