A new strain of mice engineered to lack a gene with links to autism displays many of the hallmarks of the condition. It also responds to a drug in the same way as people with autism, which might open the way to new therapies for such people. It’s not the first mouse strain to have symptoms of autism, and previous ones have already been useful models for studying the condition. Daniel Geschwind at the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues tried a fresh approach, however. Rather than simply examining existing strains to identify mice with autistic-like behaviour, they engineered mice to lack a gene called Cntnap2, which had already been implicated in autism.
