Skip to main content

Spectrum: Autism Research News

Tag: bioinformatics

October 2010

Genetics: New statistical analysis links mutations to disease

by  /  20 October 2010

A new study, published in September in PLOS Genetics, shows the importance of comparing cases to controls when linking mutations to a disorder. The researchers propose a new method of analysis that takes into account the large size of many genes expressed in the brain.

Comments
September 2010

Researchers debut unique identifiers for study participants

by  /  2 September 2010

Researchers have devised a system to assign a unique identifier to each participant in an autism study. This Global Unique Identifier, or GUID, allows investigators to see which other studies participants have enrolled in, while maintaining participants’ privacy.

Comments
August 2010

Spoken word

by  /  2 August 2010

Children with autism are known to have strange rhythms and pitch to their speech, and they speak less often or for shorter periods. Based on these patterns, a company promises to accurately identify children with the disorder.

Comments
June 2010

Autism marked by copy number changes in coding regions

by  /  11 June 2010

People with autism harbor more copy number variants (CNVs) — deletions or duplications of large chunks of DNA — compared with controls, but only in the protein-coding regions of the genome, researchers reported Wednesday in Nature. The study also pinpointed more than 100 new risk genes for autism.

Comments

New model mines simpler organisms for autism genes

by  /  3 June 2010

A new model that compares how the same genes behave in different organisms could help researchers identify previously unknown candidates for diseases such as autism. The model, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, takes advantage of the genetic overlap between humans and simpler organisms to discover genes associated with complex diseases.

Comments
May 2010

Gene expression pattern could pinpoint autism

by  /  25 May 2010

Researchers can reliably identify individuals with autism by looking at the expression pattern of a set of genes in cultured blood cells, according to a poster presented Friday at the IMFAR 2010 conference in Philadelphia.

Comments
April 2010

All together now?

by  /  19 April 2010

On 7 April, a group of investigators conducting autism genome sequencing projects met at the New York Academy of Medicine, aiming to establish the ground rules for a potential Autism Sequencing Consortium.

Comments
November 2009

Point mutation in neuroligin found in brothers with autism

by  /  6 November 2009

A new mutation in the neuroligin-4 (NLGN4) gene, one of the few genes convincingly tied to autism, has been found in two brothers with autism, further implicating the gene in the disorder, scientists reported in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Comments
October 2008

In search of meaningful copy number variations

by  /  24 October 2008

In the past few months, researchers have published dozens of reports linking single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) with susceptibility to a range of common diseases.

Comments