A groundbreaking study led by UCLA Health has unveiled the most detailed view of the complex biological mechanisms underlying autism, showing the first link between genetic risk of the disorder to observed cellular and genetic activity across different layers of the brain. The study is part of the second package of studies from the National Institutes of Health consortium, PsychENCODE. Launched in 2015, the initiative, chaired by UCLA neurogeneticist Dr.
Daniel Geschwind, is working to create maps of gene regulation across different regions of the brain and different stages of brain development. The consortium aims to bridge the gap between studies on the genetic risk for various psychiatric disorders and the potential causal mechanisms at the molecular level. This collection of manuscripts from PsychENCODE, both individually and as a package, provides an unprecedented resource for understanding the relationship of disease risk to genetic mechanisms in the brain.
" Dr. Daniel Geschwind, UCLA neurogeneticist Geschwind's study on autism, one of nine published in the May 24 issue of Science , builds on decades of his group's research profiling the genes that increase the susceptibility to autism spectrum disorder and defining the convergent molecular changes observed in the brains of individuals with autism. However, what drives these molecular changes and how they relate to genetic susceptibility in this complex condition at the cellular and circuit level are not well understood.
