New insights on sex bias in autism, and more

Sex bias: This week, new preprints highlight the influence of sex on the occurrence of de novo variants in autism and on the specific neural pathways that show altered connectivity in the condition. Sex bias also showed up in another study, which found that prenatal exposure to COVID-19 infection is associated with an increased likelihood of autism in baby girls. 

Autism research spotted this week: 

• “De novo variation in autism by sex and diagnostic status in 41,367 parent-child trios” medRxiv
• “Detection of idiosyncratic gaze-fingerprint signatures in humans” Psychological Science
• “Splice isoform-perturbation coupled to single cell transcriptome profiling reveals functions of microexons in neurogenesis and autism-linked pathways” Nature Communications
• “SARS-CoV-2 infection during pregnancy and neurodevelopmental outcomes in early childhood” Translational Psychiatry
• “Brain morphology network alterations in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder: A sex-stratified study” bioRxiv

• “A human electrophysiological signature of fragile X pathophysiology is shared in V1 of FMR1-/y mice” Nature Communications
• “Behavioral phenotype associations with resting state EEG signal complexity and power spectral density in fragile X syndrome” Autism Research
• “Behavioral and prefrontal circuit deficits in a newly developed SETBP1 haploinsufficiency mouse model” Biological Psychiatry Global Open Science