A girl with autism has a spontaneous deletion in CMIP, a gene associated with specific language impairment, providing another genetic link between the two disorders. The case study was published 11 June in Autism Research.
Mice that are unable to produce a carbohydrate molecule that regulates cell growth show behaviors that resemble the core deficits of autism, according to a study published 27 March in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Individuals with autism are more likely than controls to have small, rare duplications or deletions of stretches of DNA in genes that play a role in dampening signals in the brain, according to a study published 2 April in Molecular Autism.
The largest brain imaging study ever performed has identified candidate genes that influence brain size and general intelligence, according to research published 15 April in Nature Genetics.
FOXP2, a protein linked to language development that regulates the expression of some autism-associated genes, also dampens expression of DISC1, mutations in which have been linked to both schizophrenia and autism. The results were published 20 March in Human Molecular Genetics.
Neurons lacking PTEN, an autism-associated gene also involved in cancer, are hyperconnected to both near and distant brain cells, according to a study published 1 February in The Journal of Neuroscience.
Mice with mutations in a gene tied to language impairment and to autism have trouble learning to associate sounds with motor patterns, says a study published last week in PLoS ONE.
The characteristics, interactions and roles of autism-associated genes in the fruit flies’ brain will help guide how we think about the same genes in humans, says Ralph Greenspan.
Genes implicated in Tourette syndrome overlap with those involved in autism, according to an analysis of rare DNA duplications and deletions in people with the syndrome, published in the March issue of Biological Psychiatry.
An automated instrument can reconstruct fluorescently labeled mouse brains in less than a day, researchers reported 15 January in Nature Methods.