PsychENCODE Consortium: Autism Post-Mortem Brain RNA-Sequencing - Global changes in patterning, splicing and lncRNAs. Homo sapiens

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental syndrome characterized by deficits in social communication and mental flexibility. Genetic risk factors contribute substantially to ASD risk, and recent studies support the potential contribution of more than a thousand genes to ASD risk. However, given the shared cognitive and behavioral features across the autism spectrum, one hypothesis is that diverse risk factors may converge on common molecular, cellular, and circuit level pathways to result in the shared phenotype. Analysis of the transcriptome has been used to identify common molecular pathways in the neocortex (CTX) from postmortem human brain tissue in individuals with ASD. However, all transcriptomic studies in ASD to date have been limited to evaluating highly expressed mRNAs corresponding to protein coding genes. Moreover, most lack rigorous replication and do not assess gene expression patterns across brain regions. We apply transcriptome... (for more see dbGaP study page.)