Children, especially girls, with autism who have older fathers are more likely than those with younger fathers to be the only child with the disorder in their family, according to a new study published 16 December in Autism.

The nation’s largest database of autism research is about to get even bigger, thanks to a partnership between the National Database for Autism Research, a repository of data from 25,000 participants, and the Autism Genetic Research Exchange, a database of 2,500 families.

In families that have at least one child with autism, significant motor impairments crop up in most children with the disorder and hardly any of their unaffected siblings, according to a study published 19 October in Autism.

Individuals who have multiple children with autism have more severe social and communication deficits than either controls or those who have only one child with autism.

A protein that regulates the development of serotonin-producing neurons in the brain is associated with autism.

The largest and most ambitious genome-sequencing project to date aims to identify rare variants and study their association to disease traits in 10,000 people.

Accounting for gender increases the power of family-wide studies linking genetic mutations with autism, according to a study published in December in Molecular Psychiatry. The researchers use this approach to identify two candidate genes for the disorder.

A gene involved in epigenetics — regulation of gene expression by modifying DNA, but without altering the sequence — is associated with autism in families that have only one child with the disorder, according to a study published in November.

Better performance on intelligence tests that measure spatial rather than verbal ability is inherited in people with autism, according to a paper published online in October in Human Genetics.