Early ASD diagnosis is crucial for the initiation of behavioral therapies — therapies which often lead to a better outcome for affected individuals. Veerle Somers will identify and characterize novel maternal autoantibodies associated with the development of ASD in offspring. These findings have the potential to uncover predictive and diagnostic biomarkers for ASD and could elucidate novel etiological mechanisms of early impairment of fetal brain development in ASD.

Gordon Fishell and Jordane Dimidschstein will combine human genetic data with large-scale transcriptomic and epigenetic analyses to assess how alterations in autism risk genes affect biological processes occurring within GABAergic and cholinergic neuronal populations during the early stages of fate specification.

Seth Shipman will apply newly developed technology, called ‘molecular recordings,’ to determine the precise timing of transcriptional events that occurs within individual cell types in the developing brain, in order to provide a more robust framework to guide investigations into how ASD-linked mutations alter brain development.