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...cost $3.49. At the Phillipsburg Wal-Mart, you get 21.06 ounces for $3.98. At Toys "R" Us, a 52-load container of Tide with Febreze costs $16.49. At Wal-Mart, you get 78 loads for $19.97. Not a huge difference, but cash-strapped consumers are searching for every kind of bargain these days...
Variations in these genes on chromosome 5 are extremely common - present in more than half of healthy people. But they are even more common in individuals with autism, affecting 65%. It takes enormous genomewide association studies like this one - what researchers call very "high powered" studies - to discern this kind of statistical difference. (See six tips on traveling with an autistic child...
...second paper in Nature, published by the same team at CHOP along with scientists at numerous other institutions, looked at a specific kind of genetic change: deletions and duplications of genes. While there are many such changes associated with autism, most are very rare. This paper, however, found an intriguing pattern among two genes already linked to autism and nine newly identified targets. Most play a role in two key systems in the brain. One is the same brain-wiring system - neural cell adhesion - implicated in the first paper. The second is a set of housekeeping proteins - the ubiquitin system...
Harkonarson suggests that problems in this kind of housekeeping or maintenance function could help explain why autistic children, who have normal-looking brains at birth, develop more abnormal wiring...
What's exciting to researchers is that the confusing array of genes associated with autism are beginning to make some kind of sense. "We are starting to get convergence around genes that affect how synapses and connections in the brain are made and maintained ... particularly in the frontal lobe" says Geraldine Dawson, chief science officer for Autism Speaks, an advocacy group that, along with the National Institutes of Health, funds the AGRE database. The hope, says Dawson, a co-author of the two Nature papers, is that researchers could ultimately develop drugs that affect the biochemical pathways associated with these...