A team of researchers from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and the Center for Cancer Systems Biology (CCSB) at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has uncovered a new aspect of autism, revealing that proteins involved in autism interact with many more partners than previously known. These interactions had not been detected earlier because they involve alternatively spliced forms of autism genes found in the brain.
In their study, published in the April 11, 2014 online issue of Nature Communications, the scientists isolated hundreds of new variants of autism genes from the human brain, and then screened their protein products against thousands of other proteins to identify interacting partners. Proteins produced by alternatively-spliced autism genes and their many partners formed a biological network that produced an unprecedented view of how autism genes are connected.
“With this assembled autism network, we can begin to investigate how newly discovered mutations from patients may disrupt this network,” said Iakoucheva. “This is an important task because the mechanism by which mutant proteins contribute to autism in 99.9 percent of cases remains unknown.”