g., auditory-guided vocal and other forms of motor learning), also demonstrates how cross-species comparative studies can inform our mechanistic understanding of language through identifying shared PFI-2 manufacturer and derived elements (Fisher and Ridley, 2013 and Konopka et al., 2012). From a purely quantitative perspective, gene duplications and deletions comprise more of the genetic landscape relevant to interspecies comparisons than do single base pair changes (Conrad and Antonarakis, 2007). Genome duplication played a major role in the development of the vertebrate lineage, yet connecting these
changes to function has proven difficult (Van de Peer et al., 2009). Work from Eichler and colleagues also shows that the rate of accumulation of duplications has increased in African Great Apes relative to all other primates and that because of the repetitive elements surrounding these regions, many are the VX-809 concentration source of disease-related copy number variation
in humans (Conrad and Antonarakis, 2007 and Marques-Bonet et al., 2009). In humans, there are several hundred identified regions of interspersed segmental duplications. Since duplicated genes are likely to be under less initial constraint than the ancestral form, they also provide a fertile platform for adaptive evolution. Less clear is the role of genic deletions (Prado-Martinez et al., 2013). One clearly important example of duplication is the Duff1220 protein domain, whose role in cerebral development and function remains under investigation (Dumas et al., 2012 and Popesco et al., 2006). It was experimentally demonstrated recently that gene duplication influences vertebrate cognitive evolution via investigation of the role of paralogues Edoxaban of the DLG family of synaptic
signaling molecules and two NMDA receptor subunits derived from genome duplications in the vertebrate radiation (Nithianantharajah et al., 2013 and Ryan et al., 2013). These are challenging studies to perform from many perspectives (Belgard and Geschwind, 2013); one particularly innovative aspect of the work by Nithianantharajah et al. (2013) is the cross-species investigation of cognitive phenotypes in mouse and human using the CANTAB, which reveals parallel deficits in attention, memory, and visuospatial discrimination in knockout mice and human subjects with DLG2 mutations, three of whom suffer from schizophrenia. Ryan et al. (2013) perform domain swapping in particularly divergent regions of the NMDA receptor subunits GluN2a and GluN2b that enables them to relate different subunit components to distinct aspects of learning including executive function, which is related to the expansion of the frontal lobes in primates. Rather than focusing on conserved features of the mammalian synapse, Charrier et al. (2012) and Dennis et al.