Tracy Bale, associate professor of neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, talks about what she calls her “big soapbox issue”: the fallacious idea of a true animal model for a human psychiatric disease — and the pitfalls of over-interpreting rodent behavior.

Interested more in ideas than in dominating a crowded field, Michael Wigler decided to apply his expertise in cancer genetics to studying poorly understood features of autism.

A team of British researchers has garnered some of the first genetic evidence supporting their theory that sex hormones play a role in the development of autism.

Children with autism are no more likely than healthy children to have some of the gastrointestinal symptoms — such as diarrhea, acid reflux and abdominal discomfort — previously tied to the disorder, according to one of the first long-term investigations of the supposed link.

Several new genetic variants associated with schizophrenia lie in regions important for immune function and associated with autism. This suggests that both disorders stem partly from abnormal activation of the immune system, say some researchers.

In 2003, Stephane Jamain and his colleagues reached a breakthrough by taking a candidate approach to the X chromosome, and linking members of the neuroligin protein family to autism.

Targeting epigenetic mechanisms may offer potential new therapies for people with developmental disorders including autism, researchers said today at the Society for Neuroscience meeting.

Women who take prenatal vitamins and eat cereal supplemented with folic acid in the early months of pregnancy are less likely to have children with autism compared with women who consume less folate, suggests preliminary data from a survey presented today at the Society for Neuroscience conference.

Research on mouse models published in the past year is paving the way to reversing the symptoms of some autism-related disorders, National Institute Health directors told a packed room of 80 reporters at the morning at the Society for Neuroscience conference.

In the fall of 1980, when he left his hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, for undergraduate studies at Cornell University in upstate New York, John Constantino was determined to pursue one of two careers: a doctor or a school teacher.