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Spectrum: Autism Research News

Tag: sequencing

December 2009

Mounting evidence fingers mitochondria in autism risk

by  /  8 December 2009

Using new genetic screening technology, a few research groups are finding that a surprisingly large number of children with autism — at least five percent — have an underlying problem with their mitochondria, the energy factories of the cell.

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October 2009

Lessons from an obscure tumor

by  /  28 October 2009

There are well-established paternal age effects in diseases less common than autism. A new paper in Nature Genetics explains how the effects might arise, and it involves a kind of tumor you’ve probably never heard of.

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Video: NIH director has big plans for autism research

by  /  19 October 2009

National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins talks about the agency’s upcoming plans for “beefing up” autism research, including more than $100 million each year in grants for the field.

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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.

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March 2008

The case for copy number variations in autism

by  /  17 March 2008

Following a series of papers in the past two years, what seems irrefutable is that copy number variations ― in which a particular stretch of DNA is either deleted or duplicated ― are important in autism.

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December 2007

Aravinda Chakravarti: Not everything we do is biology

by  /  7 December 2007

Stylianos Antonarakis still vividly remembers the thorny statistical problem that had vexed him for several months in 1982. Antonarakis, then a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University, had turned to his colleagues at Hopkins, but none of them had been able to solve the problem.

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