Researchers have created a mouse carrying a deletion in SHANK3, an autism candidate gene, they reported yesterday in Nature. This is the second model of SHANK3 mutations but shows markedly more behavioral and brain defects compared with the first.Guoping Feng and colleagues report that the mice have impaired social interactions, ugly skin lesions caused by obsessive grooming, and abnormal molecular machinery at the synapse, the junction between neurons.Read more at...SFARI, March 2011.