The genes of as many as 1,600 individuals from North America and Europe will be studied as part of the Autism Genome Project, launched Monday by the National Alliance for Autism Research (NAAR) in Princeton, N.J.
"This is huge," said William McMahon, a University of Utah professor of psychiatry.
McMahon is the principal investigator for Utah's arm of the federally backed Collaborative Program for Excellence in Autism, which includes 23 universities already working to discover the neurobiology and genetics of the disorder.
Researchers have long believed autism is linked to a number of genes. What makes the Autism Genome Project promising is its scope and recently developed technology that allows scientists to pick out mutations.
The technology has not existed to efficiently scan autism patients' DNA and find mutations in common. Each patient has more than 30,000 genes.
New technology in scanning will allow researchers to conduct finer and faster searches for more than 10,000 possible mutations in a person's genome.
"It will be the first attempt in autism to use so many markers in so many families," McMahon said.
The new genome study is still a first step, McMahon said, as he expects the project to find several genes involved with autism. If that is the case, more studies will be needed, and University of Utah researchers are already at work.
McMahon and his colleagues plan to collect information, including DNA, from 800 Utah children with autism and their parents. So far, they have 150 children in the study.
Autism is a neuropsychiatric disorder that begins to impair children between the ages of 1 and 3. Scientists haven't determined the disorder's prevalence, but one study says it impairs one child out of every 166, according to NAAR.
A Phoenix nonprofit research center, the Translational Genomics Research Institute, is conducting the scans of the genes in the new project.
Outside of research facilities, teachers and parents focus on controlling the behaviors of children with autism, said Pete Nicholas, director of the Carmen B. Pingree School for Children with Autism in Salt Lake City. But with continuing research, they do hold out hope for a cure.
"Genetic research has a lot of real excitement for us," Nicholas said. "We're waiting for cures to come."
