ASD, a chronic and heterogeneous condition with many traits and co-occurring conditions, is poorly understood. In the current project, Michael Snyder and colleagues plan to initiate a study known as COUNT, whose precision approach will leverage longitudinal deep multiomic profiling of individuals with ASD to better understand the biology, characterize its heterogeneity and identify predictors of ASD traits.

In a highly collaborative effort involving three laboratories, Daniel Geschwind, Michael Gandal and Dorothy Schafer plan to explore the relationship between cortical and thalamic changes in ASD postmortem brain samples using single-cell genomic approaches, including RNAseq, ATAC-seq and spatial transcriptomics by MERFISH. This will allow for a comprehensive evaluation of the molecular changes in these circuits and their relationship to each other at a cellular level.