The Simons Simplex Collection (SSC), a database of genetic and clinical information from families that include one child with autism, has gathered data from more than 2,000 different families, researchers report in the October issue of Neuron.

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.

Two new studies use medical records from countries with nationalized health care to link autoimmune disease and obesity in parents to the likelihood of having a child with autism.

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.

Most inhibitory neurons respond in the same way to a range of visual stimulation, but a subset of them may be tuned in to specific signals, suggest two reports published in September in Neuron.

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.