Technology to identify potential biological mechanisms underlying autism spectrum disorder has been developed by scientists at Harvard University, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and MIT. The “Perturb-Seq” method investigates the function of many different genes in many different cell types at once, in a living organism. Scientists applied the large-scale method to study dozens of genes that are associated with autism spectrum disorder, identifying how specific cell types in the developing mouse brain are impacted by mutations. They used CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing to make precise changes, or perturbations, in 35 different genes linked to autism spectrum disorder risk. In general, they found that in the post-mortem human brains with autism spectrum disorder, some of the key genes with altered expression were also affected in the Perturb-seq data.
