Autism is a spectrum of disorders possibly involving multiple culprit genes.  Such a fundamental biological diversity in disease pathogenesis makes the understanding of this disease scientifically challenging. 

In a recent study published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences a group of scientists report that specific brain signatures can differentiate autistic children from their unaffected siblings.

 The authors also characterized neural signatures of the state of having autism spectrum disorders and the underlying trait of vulnerability to develop autism spectrum  disorders.

They employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study these patients and healthy controls. The imaging revealed disruptions in brain function which could have been caused by functional variation in the disease-related genes. 

Children were scanned while viewing coherent and scrambled point-light displays of biological motion created from motion capture data. The coherent biological motion displays featured an adult male actor performing movements relevant to early childhood experiences, such as playing pat-a-cake. The scrambled motion animations were created by randomly selecting 16 points from the biological motion displays and plotting their trajectories on a black background.

According the authors the presence of the unique signatures, elicited by the viewing of socially relevant biological motion, emphasizes the importance of brain mechanisms in social perception as well as the dysfunction of these mechanisms in this neurodevelopmental disorder.

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Siblings play key role in child development-University of Queensland