Researchers can roughly project what autistic children’s lives will look like years down the road. But how good is their crystal ball — and what are its benefits?

3D cultures of human brain cells kept alive for more than a year undergo transitions in gene activity that resemble those seen in newborns, and may be used to study autism genes in postnatal stages of brain development.

Like so many other events this year, autism’s biggest annual conference — the International Society for Autism Research meeting — was forced to go virtual because of the coronavirus pandemic.

No diet is likely to treat autistic people on a large scale, but diets based on a genetic profile may bring big benefits to a few.

Autism and intelligence share genetic variants, researchers grow Neanderthal mini-brains and see overlap with autism, and maternal diabetes is an autism risk factor.

Analyzing the sequences of more than 20,000 people, researchers have unearthed the largest and most robust list of autism genes so far, they reported today in Nature.

Mutations in TBR1, a candidate gene for autism, compromise its functions and its ability to bind its partners — including FOXP2. Alan Packer explores the gene’s emerging link to language.

Now that genetic studies have implicated several hundred genes in autism, researchers are turning their attention to where and when in the healthy young brain these genes are expressed. The first two studies to tackle these questions appear today in Cell.

A new candidate gene for autism, CHD8, may account for up to 0.4 percent of cases of the disorder, according to research published today in Science. CHD8 is one of six genes identified that together may contribute to one percent of autism cases.

An analysis of large duplications and deletions of DNA has identified new candidate genes for autism in pathways linked to the disorder. The results were published 22 May in Human Molecular Genetics.