Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco have built a molecular map of how proteins produced by autism risk genes interact with one another, work that scientists in the field are describing as a resource the search for treatments has lacked.
The team mapped 1,881 protein-protein interactions involving proteins encoded by 100 autism risk genes and published the results in the journal Science on August 27, 2026. About 87 percent of the interactions had not been reported before. The finding drawing the most attention is not the raw number but the pattern: many of those interactions converged on the same biological processes.
