Rare inherited variation in autism: beginning to see the forest and a few trees.
In this issue of Neuron, two papers (Lim et al., 2013; Yu et al., 2013) use whole-exome sequencing (WES) to elucidate the contribution of inherited variation to the risk for autism by leveraging the increased penetrance of homozygous and compound heterozygous rare variants in autosomes and hemizygous rare variants in the X chromosome of males. Together, they expand our knowledge about the genetic architecture of ASD, verify previously identified genes, and identify novel mutations that will guide the discovery of the critical biological processes disrupted in autism.
Program in Neurogenetics, Department of Neurology and Center for Autism Research and Treatment, Semel Institute, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
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