Mice with social behavior deficits reminiscent of autism are friendlier when raised alongside a highly social mouse strain.

The first genome-wide linkage analysis of more than 1,200 families has identified regions implicated in autism as originating from either the paternal or maternal copies of chromosomes.

The National Institutes of Health on 30 September launched a public database to catalog a particularly important type of genomic data: so-called ‘structural variations’ — large deletions, duplications and rearrangements of DNA.

Researchers have mapped unique identifiers in the regions around human genes that are at risk for duplication or deletion, allowing precise sequencing of nearly 1,000 genes for the first time, according to a paper published today in Science.

A searchable new database will greatly ease the task of comparing results from more than 25 diagnostic tests for autism, by creating clusters of the various symptoms measured.

SHANK1 — a member of a family of proteins linked to autism — does not cause autism-like social deficits when mutated in mice, according to a study published online in September in Brain Research.

Children with Williams syndrome are chatty, have rich vocabularies and love to tell stories. Yet they have trouble learning certain complex rules of grammar, according to a study published in the Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research.

People with autism show differences in the levels of various gene products compared with their unaffected siblings, according to a study published online in September in Brain Research.

A tumor suppressor best known for its role in colorectal cancer plays a critical role in forming connections between neurons, according to a study in the August 18 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

A new study, published in September in PLOS Genetics, shows the importance of comparing cases to controls when linking mutations to a disorder. The researchers propose a new method of analysis that takes into account the large size of many genes expressed in the brain.