Among the key scientific aims in SIDB's mission to discover biological mechanisms underlying autism are to investigate whether particular autism spectrum disorders are impairments in either neurodevelopment or neuromaintenance, and to determine whether there are critical periods during development when treatments may be most effective. In order to pursue these objectives, it is first necessary to understand the developmental expression patterns in different brain areas and for different cell types of those genes associated with autism, and the patterns of potentially pathogenic mutations that occur in them.
While such information is, to a degree, available in online databases and web resources, its fragmented and distributed nature can introduce barriers to its use by laboratory scientists. Here we have assembled a website for use by researchers within SIDB which collates, repackages and interactively presents information on autism-related genes from a number of gene expression and mutation databases.
The SIDB Developmental Gene Expression resource collates and interactively presents developmental expression and mutation data for autism-related genes, gathered from a number of online databases and publicly available datasets.