Absolutely delighted to share the lab’s newest study showing that autism-iPSCs diverge from control-iPSCs from early development in a region-specific manner. Heroic work by @neuro_blue & wonderful collaboration with @sbaroncohen https://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S0006-3223(20)31702-9/fulltext#%20 What did we find? (thread)

Prenatal development may be a key period when differences associated with autism could be established. We studied early neurodevelopment using human iPSCs generated from autistic or typically developing individuals.

We found that autism-iPSCs displayed impaired ability to self-organise into neural rosettes, which are neurogeneic niches that give rise to neural progenitors that subsequently differentiate into neurons.

Consistent with this, autism-iPSCs generated different types of progenitor cells compared to control-iPSCs - these differences were not due to differences in cell proliferation.

This also only occurred when autism-iPSCs were differentiated towards a cortical linage, as differentiation towards a midbrain dopaminergic fate did not yield any differences between autism- and control-iPSCs.

This work suggests that unique developmental differences associated with autism may be established at early prenatal stages.

Thanks to great collaborators @GeschwindLab @JackPriceX & others - thanks to @The_MRC @BBRFoundation @AutismResearchT for supporting this work as well as @MRC_CNDD @KCLWCIC @KingsIoPPN @ARC_Cambridge @LEAP_KCL & @Aims2Trials #stemcells #iPSCs #Neurons #DiseaseModeling #Autism