Figure 2

Emerging biological themes in ASD. (a,b) Predominant areas of neuroanatomical convergence in ASD. (a) Aberrant brain growth trajectories, with the size of ASD brains outlined in red against a background of normal brains [144–146] (images adapted from [157]); (b) abnormal cortical columns [151]. (c,d) Systems-level convergence in ASD. (c) White matter tract and functional connectivity abnormalities [126, 147–150, 152, 153] (images reproduced with permission from Mark Bastin, University of Edinburgh, UK); (d) excitation/inhibition network imbalances [93, 132, 136–141], (e-g) Genetic convergence at the cellular and molecular levels. ASD-associated genes implicated in (e) activity-dependent protein synthesis [17, 21, 23, 79, 109, 113–123], (f) neuronal activity [21, 22, 25, 70, 105–112], and (g) neuronal cell adhesion [20–22, 34–37, 49–52, 68, 75, 79, 93, 109, 126–129, 131–137].