What are Neuroblastomas? 159mentioned above may be due to the high frequency of open reading frames
(ORFs) during early fetal brain development. As mentioned above [52], certain
exons are more vulnerable to mutations in ASD and other neurodevelopmen-
tal disorders [53]. We believe this is due to the presence of a large numbers of
ORFs during that particular stage of development in those chromosomes. In
molecular biology, an ORF is the part of a reading frame that has the potential
to be translated. An ORF is a continuous stretch of codons that contain a start
codon (usually AUG) and a stop codon (usually UAA, UAG, or UGA). An ORF
can be described as a handle of a knife; one has to hold that handle before start-
ing to slice something.
What are Neuroblastomas?
In order to answer this particular question, we decided to use what nature
has provided as a natural tool for ASD investigation. First, we would like to
introduce a natural tool that can be used to investigate ASD. We have utilized
neuroblastoma cells.
A neuroblastoma is an embryonal tumor of the nervous system, arising
during fetal or early post‐natal life from neuronal cells derived from the
neural crest. Briefly, these cells behave like fetal brain neurons in the pri-
mordial brain, which at 5 weeks of gestation is the size of a grain of sand.
There is no protective solid brain skull or even the meningeal protective
thick membrane. And, most importantly, there is no blood–brain barrier.
The brain stem cells at 5 weeks of gestation are vulnerable to any adverse
synthetic chemicals that are evolutionarily new to the human detoxification
system. The pregnant women who are carrying those babies, if exposed to a
harmful chemical or chemicals with only even a few molecules reaching
their fetuses’ brain, will turn them into “silent offspring”! Just a reminder
here that a fragrance can contain up to 4,000 synthetic chemicals, many of
them can selectively harm fetal brain neurons. Why selectively? Why do
these chemicals not kill the whole brain? The fact is that about 10–25% of
known pregnancies end in miscarriage, and more than 80% of these losses
happen before 12 weeks. How many fetuses become victims to synthetic
chemicals before week 12 is anyone’s guess. We believe that many factors
play roles in the destruction of fetuses.
In our studies we used neuroblastoma cell lines that originate from the neu-
ral crest. We have acquired numerous neuroblastoma cell lines that behave like
fetal brain cells and most of the cell lines contain progenitor neurons that are
destined to become various brain compartments in a newborn infant [54–57].
They can be differentiated under the influence of retinoic acid and contain
numerous progenitor cells, representing many faculties of the human brain,
including neurons that express oxytocin and AVP receptors. These receptors