From The Transmitter by Katie Moisse

The findings, shared in a preprint, help to illuminate how a large and heterogeneous group of genes could be involved in autism.

Who’s the boss: Some 78 “central regulators” (large circles) control the expression of other genes (small circles), some of which have a link to autism (red and yellow), a preprint finds.

Knocking down 19 genes linked to autism, one at a time, shakes up a network of other genes, many of which regulate the early proliferation and differentiation of brain cells, according to a new preprint. Some people with autism carry rare variants of certain genes in the network, previous research has found. Others have been implicated in genome-wide association studies of autism, which reveal common genetic variants that may work in combination to increase autism likelihood.

“We’re finding this really interesting signal of autism-associated genes that are changing when we perturb just a single autism-associated gene,” says study investigator Rebecca Andersen, a postdoctoral researcher in Christopher Walsh’s lab at Boston Children’s Hospital. “That could explain how [disruptions to] these different autism-associated genes could all lead to similar neurodevelopmental phenotypes and, eventually, a diagnosis of autism.”