A compound that activates a pathway related to learning and memory can enhance pair-bonding between prairie voles, according to a study published 7 April in Biological Psychiatry. Enhancing social learning — an individual’s response to social cues — during development could help treat autism.

Harmful mutations in a gene that regulates the chemical environment outside of neurons are associated with both autism and epilepsy, according to a study published 31 March in Neurobiology of Disease.

Two networks of genes are abnormally expressed in the brains of people with autism, according to a study published today in Nature.

Individuals with autism have multiple mutations in a pathway that functions in the mitochondria, the energy center of the cell, according to a study published 27 April in the European Journal of Human Genetics. They also have higher-than-average numbers of variants in pathways involved in metabolism, gene expression and the regulation of cell division.

MeCP2, the protein that’s missing or mutated in Rett syndrome, is crucial for remodeling neural circuits in response to vision, according to a study published in April in Neuron.

Speech-generating devices are a beneficial intervention for people with autism who cannot speak or sign, according to two studies published in the past few months.

Individuals with intellectual disability are more likely than controls to have harmful mutations in autism candidate genes, according to a study published 11 March in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

Adults with autism get better at recognizing faces after they are trained to observe faces as a whole, instead of focusing on individual features, according to a study published 12 April in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

Teenage boys with Asperger syndrome with higher-than-average scores on tests of abstract reasoning fare worse than controls on short-term memory and ability to filter out distractions.

Mice lacking CNTNAP2, a gene linked to autism and language impairment, show behaviors and brain abnormalities that reflect those seen in people with disorder, according to new findings presented Thursday at the International Meeting for Autism Research in San Diego.