Insights on the functional impact of microRNAs present in autism-associated copy number variants.

Autism spectrum disorder is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder that appears during the first three years of infancy and lasts throughout a person's life. Recently a large category of genomic structural variants, denoted as copy number variants (CNVs), were established to be a major contributor of the pathophysiology of autism. To date almost all studies have focussed only on the genes present in the CNV loci, but the impact of non-coding regulatory microRNAs (miRNAs) present in these regions remain largely unexplored.