We’re headed to Washington, D.C. for the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, and hope to make your lives a little bit easier by reporting on what matters to you.

Children with autism have an abnormally large number of neurons in the prefrontal cortex, a brain region important for abstract thinking, planning and social behaviors, according to a study published yesterday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The Rett syndrome gene MeCP2 may subtly regulate the expression of genes across the genome by altering DNA structure.

Researchers have sequenced 17 laboratory mice and mapped 56.7 million single-base DNA variants in their genomes, according to a study published 15 September in Nature. A companion paper in the same issue identifies more than 700,000 structural variants, which are insertions, deletions or other modifications of DNA.

Knowledge of autism in China is spotty, according to a large survey published last month.

Two studies published in the past month highlight the challenges in balancing the accuracy of autism diagnosis with cost-effectiveness and speed.

Over the past 30 years, autism research pioneer Fred Volkmar says he has learned that researchers should be humble when assigning meaning to autism behavior, and seek to translate their findings into useful applications.  

Growing up bilingual doesn’t impair language skills in children with autism, according to two studies in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

A large, centralized bank of brain tissue from young people could greatly accelerate autism research. Thanks to a growing interest from nonprofit organizations, the idea is finally gaining momentum.

In a study of people missing an autism-linked region on chromosome 22, researchers have found that the larger the deletion, the more likely the individual is to have severe symptoms, from motor and speech delays to a large head and fleshy hands.