CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Nature Precedings The genetics of colored sequence synesthesia: Evidence of linkage to chromosome 16q and genetic heterogeneity for the condition Stephanie S. Nelson1, Nili Avidan2, Anand K. Sarma1, Rejnal Tushe1, Dianna M. Milewicz2, Kwanghyuk Lee3, Molly Bray4, Suzanne M. Leal3, David M. Eagleman1,5* 1Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA; 2Division of Medical Genetics, Department of Internal Medicine, University of Texas Medical School at Houston, Houston, TX, USA; 3Department of Molecular and Human Genetics, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA; 4Departments of Epidemiology and Genetics, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL, 5Department of Psychiatry, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA *Correspondence: David Eagleman, PhD, Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX 77030, USA. Email:
[email protected] Abstract Synesthesia is a perceptual condition in which normal sensory stimulation can trigger anomalous sensory experiences. For example, synesthetes may experience colors in response to sounds, tastes in response to words, or smells in response to touch. We here focus on colored sequence synesthesia, in which color experiences are triggered by learned ordinal sequences such as letters, numbers, weekdays and months. Although synesthesia has been noted in the scientific literature for over a century, it is understood only at the level of the phenomenology, and not at the molecular and neural levels. We have performed a linkage analysis to identify the first genetic loci responsible for the increased neural crosstalk underlying colored sequence synesthesia. Our analysis has identified a 23 MB region on chromosome 16 as a putative locus for the trait.