Autism and Developmental Disorders Colloquium Series

“Advances in the genomic architecture of Autism Spectrum Disorders”

Joseph D. Buxbaum, Ph.D.

Professor of Psychiatry, Genetics And Genomic Sciences, and Neuroscience, Department of Psychiatry, Mount Sinai School of Medicine

6:00 p.m., Wednesday, March 5, 2008
MIT Building 46-3002 (auditorium), followed by a reception

Building Address: 43 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02139

Hosted by Damon Page, Ph.D., and the Brain Development and Disorders Project at MIT

Supported by the Simons Foundation and the Anne and Paul Marcus Family Foundation

Colloquia sponsored by the Autism Consortium

Please RSVP to lmavros@mit.edu

Autism and autism spectrum disorders are disorders (ASDs) with a profound genetic component. However, the evidence clearly shows that these disorders are complex in nature. Recent advances in whole-genome methods, as well as deeper resequencing efforts have begun to lead to the identification of genetic causes for ASDs in specific cases. Such causes include de novo and inherited events and copy number variants (CNVs) and mutations. These studies begin to implicate particular cellular pathways in ASDs. One of the most interesting pathways that has been implicated in recent studies is that involved in the functioning of excitatory synapses. As we can now begin to define such pathways, animal models are possible and one can consider novel approaches to therapeutics.