Un-common Discovery

You’ve probably noticed that newsstands everywhere are covering a huge breakthrough in autism: the discovery of the first common genetic risk variants for autism.The study — by far the biggest to date — pinned six variants, all nestled between two genes on chromosome 5.Adding even more grist to the mill, another study released yesterday also pointed to this region. Scanning about 900 families, that study found eight genetic variants that are more common in family members with autism than in their healthy kin. And again, all eight variants sit — you guessed it — in that same hot spot on chromosome 5.The immediately obvious question is: what exactly are those variants doing there?Read more at...SFARI, April 2009.