Spectrum: Autism Research News

Representation was the theme of this this week, with a deep discussion on ‘profound autism’ and info about an upcoming conference.

Recent Twitter threads explore a new approach to autism diagnosis, a mysterious genetic region and social determinants of health.

Two threads pose intriguing neuroscience questions; plus a criminal-justice policy brief.

Threads on a GoogleMap for the brain and guidance on communicating with autistic people in a health-care setting garnered gobs of comments this week.

Our Twitter feeds were awash with research activity this week, including a review of autism intervention studies and resources to build better data-wrangling skills.

Highlights this week include two gene studies — one on the role of autism-linked genes in developing interneurons and another on the genetic origins of overlapping autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

The talk of the Twittersphere turned around two influential neuroscience papers, plus a virtual trip to the World Congress of Psychiatric Genetics.

Tickling our brains on Twitter this week were threads about helping neuroscientists learn the programming language Python, a study about autistic schoolchildren, and the possible root of modern humans’ brain power.

Two overlooked groups in autism research — autistic adults and people with profound autism — dominated this week’s talk on Twitter.

This week, we’re bringing you some labors of love: a thread lamenting the autism field’s focus on gene lists, a study introducing genetic diversity in mouse models, and long-awaited results from a biomarker study.