Depression can come from many things, such as reading Twitter too often, but a new study has revealed that feeling lousy is partly the fault of changes in the brain over the course of human evolution.

Serotonin and dopamine are critical to keeping us upbeat and positive, but a gene tasked with transporting these chemicals to our brain has evolved to carry less of these neurochemicals, a research team led by Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, has concluded.

Vesicular monoamine transporter 1 (VMAT1) is one of the genes responsible for delivering mood-boosting neurotransmitters to our brain. By reconstructing ancestral VMAT1 proteins, they found that the ‘older’ gene had a higher uptake of its newer variant.

The discovery has shed light on how neurotransmitter uptake by VMAT1 has changed throughout the course of human evolution.

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“The results of our study reveal that our ancestors may have been able to withstand higher levels of anxiety or depression,” the authors concluded in their study.

The next step for the researchers will be to study the behavioral consequences of this gene mutation in mice, to see how the changes might have affected our own brain evolution.

The scientists said they hope their work could help provide insights into psychiatric disorders.

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