Many autistic researchers say that academia could be the perfect place for them — but a number of obstacles stand in the way.

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.

The drug quells seizures in children with Dravet syndrome or Lennox-Gastaut syndrome.

Prenatal exposure to topiramate increases a child’s autism odds, according to the study that prompted the inquiry, but experts caution that pregnant people with epilepsy have few other options for controlling seizures.

Showing an association is not enough to determine causation.

A short time ago on Twitter feeds not so far, far away, a new voltage sensor called JEDI-2P (no, it’s not a lightsaber) had users jawing like Jawas, while other threads featured talk of mental health interventions and sex biases in autism research.

Roche’s gene therapy drug Rugonersen boosts expression of the protein missing in the syndrome in mice and monkeys, but whether it works in people remains to be seen.

Many brain regions develop differently between people with 22q11.2 duplications and deletions, and those trajectories also vary with a person’s diagnosis.

This month, a commonly used emotion-recognition test doesn’t perform as expected — nor does a survey of past efforts to train autism specialists or a hunt for the sources of the sleep problems that often accompany the condition.

What these genes do and how they affect autism depends on when in development they’re studied, despite what classic ‘gene ontology’ analyses say.