Effective treatment of patients with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is still absent so far. Taurine exhibits therapeutic effects towards the autism-like behaviour in ASD model animals. Here, we determined the mechanism of taurine effect on hippocampal neurogenesis in genetically inbred BTBR T+ tf/J (BTBR) mice, a proposed model of ASD. In this ASD mouse model, we explored the effect of oral taurine supplementation on ASD-like behaviours in an open field test, elevated plus maze, marble burying test, self-grooming test, and three-chamber test. The mice were divided into four groups of normal controls (WT) and models (BTBR), who did or did not receive 6-week taurine supplementation in water (WT, WT+ Taurine, BTBR, and BTBR+Taurine). Neurogenesis-related effects were determined by Ki67 immunofluorescence staining. Western blot analysis was performed to detect the expression of phosphatase and tensin homologue deleted from chromosome 10 (PTEN)/mTOR/AKT pathway-associated proteins. Our results showed that taurine improved the autism-like behaviour, increased the proliferation of hippocampal cells, promoted PTEN expression, and reduced phosphorylation of mTOR and AKT in hippocampal tissue of the BTBR mice. In conclusion, taurine reduced the autism-like behaviour in partially inherited autism model mice, which may be associa-ted with improving the defective neural precursor cell proliferation and enhancing the PTEN-associated pathway in hippocampal tissue.

• MeSH
• Autistic Disorder * metabolism   drug therapy   MeSH
• Behavior, Animal drug effects   MeSH
• PTEN Phosphohydrolase * metabolism   MeSH
• Hippocampus * metabolism   drug effects   MeSH
• Disease Models, Animal MeSH
• Mice MeSH
• Neurogenesis * drug effects   MeSH
• Autism Spectrum Disorder metabolism   drug therapy   MeSH
• Cell Proliferation drug effects   MeSH
• Proto-Oncogene Proteins c-akt * metabolism   MeSH
• Signal Transduction * drug effects   MeSH
• Taurine * pharmacology   MeSH
• TOR Serine-Threonine Kinases * metabolism   MeSH
• Animals MeSH
• Check Tag
• Male MeSH
• Mice MeSH
• Animals MeSH
• Publication type
• Journal Article MeSH