Figure 1.

Creating brain cells from skin cells to study the impact of autism on the living brain. Shown is an overview of the autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) fibroblast and induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) resource at the Children’s Hospital of Orange County. Skin biopsies from clinically well-defined patients with ASD were obtained, explant fibroblast cultures were established, expanded, and banked, and iPSCs were generated and characterized. After differentiation to the neural lineage, the ASD-specific cells can be compared with normal unaffected controls, allowing a myriad of biochemical, next-generation sequencing, and bioinformatics approaches.