Researchers have taken skin cells from individuals with schizophrenia, bathed them in chemical cocktails and coaxed them to develop into neurons, according to a paper published 13 April in Nature.
An Italian group is investigating the provocative hypothesis that some cases of autism are the result of a viral infection passed from sperm to fetus.
A gene that regulates the conversion of testosterone to estrogen in the brain could help explain why males are more susceptible to autism than are females, according to a study published in PLoS One in February.
The first study to look at mitochondria — the powerhouses of the cell — in postmortem brain tissue taken from children with autism has found significant abnormalities in their function in some regions of the brain.
Researchers have extracted and sequenced DNA from 52 postmortem brains from the Autism Tissue Program, providing a resource to study mutations and gene expression differences in the brains of people with the disorder.
The brains of people with autism show three distinct periods of abnormal development — overgrowth in infancy, prematurely arrested growth in childhood, and shrinking between adolescence and middle age — according to a study in Brain Research.
Changes in the bodies of neurons may account for communication deficits in the brains of people with autism, according to a study published 3 November in The Journal of Neuroscience.
People with autism have fewer Purkinje cells in a region of the cerebellum that has undergone rapid recent evolution, according to a postmortem study presented Tuesday at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego.
The Allen Institute for Brain Science has released whole-genome expression data from one-and-a-half adult human brains, and is gathering information from samples at different stages of development, from four weeks after conception to adulthood. The data were described at poster sessions Saturday and Tuesday at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego.
The brains of children with autism show differences in gene expression compared with those of healthy controls, especially in genes that control cell growth. Adults with autism also have aberrant gene expression, but in different pathways, researchers reported Sunday at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego.