News – The Transmitter

The meeting last week sparked concerns about the latest Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee’s ability to perform its core function: developing a strategy to support autism research.

In a “surprise” role, the cells regulate the neurons that produce gonadotropin-releasing hormone.

The results mark a “dramatic shift” in how neuroscientists think about sex differences, and they may help explain sex biases in certain neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental conditions.

The swift reversal came after more than 1,000 scientists signed an open letter protesting the rules last week.

The combination of a serotonin-producing organoid with an organoid based on the developing cerebral cortex offers a new way to investigate neuromodulation.

At the 25 th annual meeting of the International Society for Autism Research, scientists, clinicians and self-advocates gathered to discuss topics such as autism genetics and the gap between clinical trials and real-world benefits.

In an open letter, scientists call the ERC’s suggestion to block grant reapplications for an additional year “at odds with scientific excellence.”

An experiment in sea slugs suggests transcriptional changes might fade after 24 hours.

Here is a roundup of autism-related news and research spotted around the web for the week of 27 April.

The order provides a potential path to remove some psychedelic drugs from the strictest regulatory category, yet it “may not be the breakthrough the basic research community has been looking for,” says neuroscientist Shawn Lockery.

The rodents offered researchers an opportunity to link genetically driven changes in corticospinal abundance and morphology to climbing cachet.

Opposite day: Neurodevelopmental conditions may arise from disruptions in the systems-level maturation of neuronal circuits, according to a new preprint. The investigators compared the effects of SYNGAP1 haploinsufficiency in mice with the effects of SYNGAP1 disruption in cortical excitatory neurons. The former induced two altered and opposing patterns of neuronal activity in the cortex, whereas …

A previously unrecognized population of fibroblasts seals off the base of the choroid plexus—the network of blood vessels and cerebrospinal-fluid-producing epithelial cells that line the ventricles—from the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and the rest of the brain, a new study in mice shows. The newly identified barrier provides an added layer of protection that is distinct from the well-known blood-br…

A neural network based on a nematode worm’s connectome can puppeteer a digital fruit fly’s body, a new preprint shows. The work comes just two weeks after Eon Systems, a neurotechnology company based in San Francisco, announced that it had “uploaded” a fly brain and released a video of that brain controlling a biomechanical fly model in a virtual world. “We need to be really careful in interpreti…

Astrocytes are the most abundant non-neuronal cell in the brain and a fresh focus in autism research. As with other glial cells, they were long considered “support cells” for neurons—but recent research makes it clear they play critical roles as neuromodulators. Studies are showing their role in guiding neural pathway development and regulating social behaviors, oxytocin and anxiety in ways that …

The authors of a Nature paper outlining a mechanism for multisensory memories in Drosophila melongaster have retracted the work after they were unable to replicate a set of imaging experiments. The paper’s overall conclusions remain unaffected, says study investigator Scott Waddell, professor of neurobiology at the University of Oxford. The team plans to resubmit the work without the imaging expe…

Brain evolution: Molecular and cellular regulatory components that support neuronal communication across the layers of the cerebral cortex distinguish mammalian brains from non-mammalian ones, a new study details. The investigators focused on the many types of excitatory projection neurons and their genes—and specifically zeroed in on the transcription factor ZBTB18, which is implicated in autism…

Supporters of U.S. neuroscience research sent a letter to Congress last week asking for increased funding for the National Institutes of Health’s BRAIN Initiative in the face of one of the program’s funding streams coming to end. In the letter, 150 organizations asked Congress to appropriate $468 million for the BRAIN Initiative for the coming fiscal year. That amount, the same that BRAIN receive…

Organizers of a leading neuroscience conference are trying to allay concerns after a policy that bars submissions from researchers based at institutions sanctioned by the United States government attracted intense scrutiny online. Representatives of the 40th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), due to take place in Sydney, Australia, in December 2026, took to X (f…

Across the United States and Europe, funding is flowing to develop and advance non-animal-based research methods. Last week, the U.S. National Institutes of Health announced $150 million—its first round of funding under the Complement Animal Research in Experimentation program—dedicated to the study and testing of novel alternative methods (NAMs), such as organoids and computational modeling tech…