In a study published today in Nature, researchers identified hundreds of new microexons—short gene segments that appear to play a key role in ASD and other neurological conditions—and developed a machine learning approach to predict the impact of ASD-associated genetic variants on the regulation of these segments.
“Autism is characterized by multifactorial genetics,” says Benjamin Blencowe, the study’s co-senior author and a professor at U of T’s Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research and in the department of molecular genetics at the Temerty Faculty of Medicine.