Studies at the level of neural circuits are needed to better understand the importance of both increased and decreased connectivity between different regions in the autism brain, say John Rubenstein and Vikaas Sohal.
A new imaging technique that can assemble finely detailed pictures of an individual mouse’s brain in less than a day is being used to explore mouse models of autism. Data from the first two models were presented Wednesday at the 2013 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego.
By mapping the brains of not 1 but 27 mouse models of autism, researchers are making sense of the widely divergent structural changes seen in autism brains, they reported Wednesday at the 2013 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego.
Mice lacking the autism-linked gene CNTNAP2 process sounds more slowly than control mice do but are better at discriminating between tones. The unpublished research was presented Tuesday at the 2013 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego.
A gene’s length may influence its expression, and this has implications for autism, which tends to be linked to particularly long genes, says Mark Zylka.
Rodent models that recapitulate the core features of autism often have additional traits, leading us to ask whether these traits are integral to autism, says Elisa Hill-Yardin.
Simon Fisher made headlines in 2001 for finding the first gene related to language. He has been following FOXP2 ever since, and has found that it is important in autism and other psychiatric disorders.
A single gene mutation leads to Rett syndrome, but other variants may modify the severity of an individual’s symptoms, according to a study published 28 February in PLoS One.
Chromosomal duplications or deletions may influence autism-linked genes indirectly, by altering fragments of RNA that regulate gene expression, according to a study published 25 February in PLoS One.
A new method that renders the brain transparent generates unprecedented views of long-range neuronal connections, researchers reported 10 April in Nature.