New Technology to Investigate Autism Spectrum Disorder

Technology to identify potential biological mechanisms underlying autism spectrum disorder has been developed by scientists at Harvard University, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and MIT. The “Perturb-Seq” method investigates the function of many different genes in many different cell types at once, in a living organism. Scientists applied the large-scale method to study dozens of genes that are associated with autism spectrum disorder, identifying how specific cell types in the developing mouse brain are impacted by mutations. Published in the journal Science, the method is also broadly applicable to other organs, enabling scientists to better understand a wide range of disease and normal processes. Read More