The unusually high incidence of cranial and facial anomalies among people with autism may provide insight into the underlying biology of the disorder. Curtis Deutsch of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver Center at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and his colleagues are evaluating these anomalies using new, state-of-the-art imaging technology.
Ann Marie Craig is professor of psychiatry and Canada Research Chair in Neurobiology at the University of British Columbia and is a member of the Royal Society of Canada. She began her studies on synapses as a postdoctoral fellow with Gary Banker and held previous faculty positions at the University of Illinois and at Washington University in St. Louis.
Charles Craik is a professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He is also the founder and director of the Chemistry and Chemical Biology Graduate Program.
Gerald Crabtree is the David Korn Professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. He has been a Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative Investigator since 2014 and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 1988.
Craig Erickson specializes in research and clinical treatment involving persons with developmental disorders. His primary research focus is on new treatment development for fragile X syndrome, autism spectrum disorders and other related disorders.
He is the director of the Fragile X Research and Treatment Center and also serves as the director of research at the Kelly O'Leary Center for Autism Spectrum Disorders.
Researchers need reliable methods to interpret autism candidate genes, including rodent models to assess the impact of genes on behavior. On 4 February, SFARI hosted a workshop to discuss the role of mouse models and behavioral assays in autism research. The participants concluded that the field should invest in techniques that can be standardized across laboratories and emphasized the importance of mouse models for identifying biomarkers and testing therapies.
Copy number variants (CNVs) are segments of DNA that vary in copy number between different individuals. CNVs confer significant risk of neuropsychiatric disorders, including autism and schizophrenia. Notably, there appears to be a reciprocal relationship between copy number and brain size for certain genetic loci. For example, deletions of the genomic region 16p11.2 tend to be associated with autism and increased head circumference, whereas duplications of the same segment tend to be associated with schizophrenia and smaller head circumference. The contrasting clinical phenotypes that are associated with reciprocal changes in gene dosage could represent opposite extremes of the same neurodevelopmental process.