Memories from Diering’s life trace the rising star’s scientific path from raising lizards as a child and later exploring home brewing to heading a lab that investigates memory, sleep disturbances and early development in animals with autism-linked mutations.

Rhythmic variations in the genes’ brain expression levels may help explain the sleep problems that often accompany the condition.

Compared with their unaffected siblings and unrelated controls, children with autism harbor more copy number variants in genes that govern the circadian cycle or are associated with insomnia.

Mice with a mutated copy of SHANK3 fail to establish normal sleep patterns during development.

This month, a commonly used emotion-recognition test doesn’t perform as expected — nor does a survey of past efforts to train autism specialists or a hunt for the sources of the sleep problems that often accompany the condition.

Even temporary bouts of too little non-REM sleep can lead to long-term changes in how the animals respond to certain social situations, new research suggests.

The young researcher from Uruguay uses her expertise in genetics — and discipline as a former athlete — to untangle sleep’s role in neurodevelopmental conditions, one experiment at a time.

A new study is the first to link social, repetitive and motor behaviors to mutations in BMAL1, which regulates the body’s circadian rhythms.

Pups born to mothers that experience low oxygen during sleep have overactive mTOR signaling, which has been linked to some forms of autism.

Sleep problems may contribute to or derive from autism traits — or both. After decades of work, researchers are beginning to uncover the biological connections between the two conditions, revealing new paths to potential treatments.