Take That, Anti-Vaccine People

A new study in the New England Journal of Medicine led by Harvard's Mark Daly found an association between changes to chromosome 16 and autism. Using a genome-wide association study of Autism Genetic Resource Exchange families, they searched for copy-number variations and found that a de novo deletion or duplication of 593 kb on chromosome 16p11.2 conveys susceptibility to autism. Sandra Porter at Discovering Biology in a Digital World adds, "It's not yet known which of the 25 genes in this 147,000 base region is related to the development of autism, but the trail is getting warmer."