Annette Estes

TL;DR: The genome-wide characteristics of rare (<1% frequency) copy number variation in ASD are analysed using dense genotyping arrays to reveal many new genetic and functional targets in ASD that may lead to final connected pathways.

TL;DR: Linkage and copy number variation analyses implicate chromosome 11p12–p13 and neurexins, respectively, among other candidate loci, highlighting glutamate-related genes as promising candidates for contributing to ASDs.

TL;DR: Several new susceptibility genes encoding neuronal cell-adhesion molecules, including NLGN1 and ASTN2, were enriched with CNVs in ASD cases compared to controls, and duplications 55 kilobases upstream of complementary DNA AK123120 indicate that these two important gene networks expressed within the central nervous system may contribute to the genetic susceptibility of ASD.

TL;DR: Combined impairments in joint attention and social orienting were found to best distinguish young children with ASD from those without ASD and structural equation modeling indicated that joint attention was the best predictor of concurrent language ability.

TL;DR: The results implicate neuronal cell-adhesion molecules in the pathogenesis of ASDs, and represent, to the authors' knowledge, the first demonstration of genome-wide significant association of common variants with susceptibility to ASDs.