A gene’s length may influence its expression, and this has implications for autism, which tends to be linked to particularly long genes, says Mark Zylka. 

Rodent models that recapitulate the core features of autism often have additional traits, leading us to ask whether these traits are integral to autism, says Elisa Hill-Yardin.

Clinicians should place children under age 5 who have developmental delay into a broad diagnostic category, called ESSENCE, which may then resolve into any number of individual diagnoses over time, says Christopher Gillberg. 

Age-based cutoff scores for BISCUIT, an early diagnostic tool for children with autism traits, help clinicians accurately identify children who also have other disorders, says Johnny Matson.

Autism may be male-biased in prevalence, but our understanding of it should not be, argues Meng-Chuan Lai.

Certain mutations may hijack the normal mechanisms of sperm production, leading to an enrichment of mutant sperm in older fathers, and to the paternal-age effect in autism.

The autism-like features seen in related neurological disorders may be the result of intellectual disability and not a shared underlying biology, says Alan Packer.
 

Understanding the basis of sexual dimorphism in autism may not only inform our treatment of this condition, but may translate to therapies for many other mental illnesses, say Nirao Shah and Devanand Manoli.

Preschool-aged children with autism make developmental and behavioral gains, regardless of the type of classroom in which they are enrolled, say Brian Boyd and Samuel Odom.

Emerging evidence indicates that microglia, the brain’s immune cells, are altered in some individuals with autism, raising questions about their role in brain development, says Beth Stevens.