Welcome to the first of our biannual newsletter of 2021. Our aim with the newsletters is to share ground-breaking autism research breakthroughs and information about the recent progress of our research.
This past year is no doubt been one of the most difficult for each of us, and the world at large. The difficulties of trying to navigate the new normal brought about by COVID-19 has been challenging. The ASD community is severely impacted by the pandemic, with most services being paused or completely discontinued. Thus, making it increasingly difficult for people that already have very little support. As a result, the current pandemic has revealed and emphasized the need for improved strategies to support the ASD community.
Launch of our new website
The pandemic also affected the research of our lab and the greater scientific community, with the lockdown forcing us to work from home and find other ways of learning, sharing knowledge and continuing research. Nonetheless, our research team has made progress in several avenues. As part of our goal to narrow the gap between our ASD community and the ASD scientific community in South Africa, we are proud to share with you the launch of our new website. Here, you will find more information about how you can participate in our most recent study, meet the current and previous members of our lab, get more information about our current research projects, a student blog space and autism resources and links. We hope that through the website we can share with you ASD scientific knowledge to facilitate an understanding of ASD in South Africa. We hope to grow our community by sharing the website to promote molecular ASD research in South Africa, which is currently greatly understudied in our country.
Findings from our study
"... get more information about our current research projects, a student blog space and autism resources and links."
Our journey into understanding the molecular mechanisms of ASD in South Africa started in 2014 when we started recruiting the first participants for our study. We now have a ground-breaking research article (Stathopoulos et al 2020) published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal called Autism Research. A major aim of the study was to establish a well-characterised group of individuals with an ASD diagnosis to compare their genetics to individuals without ASD. The results of our paper showed that DNA methylation is different between children with and without autism in South Africa. Our data also revealed that these differences are associated with mitochondrial dysfunction. Our research has helped us engage the international scientific community working on Autism and our work was also covered by other outlets (e.g., UCT newsletter) and shortly in Spectrum News (“a leading source of news and expert opinion on autism research”). Our research has raised more interesting questions about the role of mitochondrial dysfunction in ASD and this is currently being explored in our lab in a number of different projects.
International exposure
We have presented some of the results from our current projects at international conferences such as the International Society for Autism Research (INSAR) in Montreal Canada in 2019 and the 12th Forum of Neuroscience (FENS) virtual conference in 2020. None of this work would have been possible without your participation and contribution, for which we are sincerely grateful to the ASD community including parents, educators, schools, caregivers, and therapists. If you would like to participate in our current study or would like more information, please check out our website or email us: genetics.kidslab@gmail.com.
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