Department of Psychiatry, New England Medical Center, Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
Although autism is clearly inherited, it may be challenging to find the genes involved: The mechanism of inheritance is unknown, families with an autistic child are usually small, parent-child pairs are rare, and a fairly large number of genes may be involved, some or all of which may have a small effect on the phenotype. We discuss several strategies for finding genes, all of which may be used in combination to find the relevant genes.