Year 1

During the first year of the project, we focused on creating a cell bank of reprogrammed fibroblasts derived from several autistic patients. These pluripotent stem cells were then induced to differentiate into neurons and gene expression analyses will be done at different time points along the process. We also used some of the syndromic and non-syndromic patients for neuronal phenotypic assays and found that a subset of idiopathic autism cases displayed a molecular overlap with Rett syndrome. Our plan is to use these data to test the ability of candidate drugs on reverting some of the neuronal defects observed in patient neurons.