Families need more support from researchers in order for their heroic efforts to be optimally effective.

After a decade of fast-paced discovery, researchers are racing toward bigger datasets, more genes and a deeper understanding of the biology of autism.

A massive sequencing study spanning seven countries links 38 new genes to autism and developmental delay.

Alterations to chromosome 7 lead to changes in the chemical marks that direct gene expression.

People with different genetic forms of autism may have distinct brain-wave signatures, according to preliminary data presented yesterday at the International Meeting for Autism Research in Salt Lake City, Utah. 

Mutations in the gene DYRK1A underlie a type of autism marked by an unusually small head. The new work expands the breadth of symptoms included under the autism umbrella.

Many of the genes that have emerged as the strongest autism candidates have turned out to regulate the expression of hundreds, if not thousands, of other genes. Within these networks, scientists are homing in on pathways that underlie autism.

CHD8, a gene that has emerged as one of the strongest risk factors for autism, regulates the expression of more than half of a set of ‘high-confidence’ risk genes for the disorder. The unpublished data were presented Saturday at the 2014 International Meeting for Autism Research in Atlanta.

Now that genetic studies have implicated several hundred genes in autism, researchers are turning their attention to where and when in the healthy young brain these genes are expressed. The first two studies to tackle these questions appear today in Cell.

A number of autism risk factors converge on one cellular pathway: abnormal remodeling of the cell’s structural systems through the signaling protein Rho, says SFARI’s associate director for research, Alan Packer.