Gene Primer for people interested in Autism
Today’s post is a standalone introduction to genetics, as relevant for lay people interested in autism. The scientists among you will likely know all this and more, but many more people are talking about genes and genetic testing these days. Genetics is the domain of some very clever scientists and to fully understand this field would require a great deal of effort. Often the cleverest people are the least able to explain things to the rest of us. Some equally clever researchers think that there will be so many possible autism genes that it is better to focus on the much smaller number of shared affected pathways. I stand with the latter group. Confused? He should be. As is often the case, even a basic understanding of the principles does allow you to draw meaningful practical conclusions from the ever-expanding pool of research. In most cases of idiopathic autism there is over/under expression of a very large number of genes. Most of these genes do their job an...