AI in Action: Combing the genome for the roots of autism

Artificial intelligence tools are helping to reveal the genetic components of autism. For geneticists, autism is a vexing challenge. Inheritance patterns suggest it has a strong genetic component. But variants in scores of genes known to play some role in autism can explain only about 20% of all cases. Finding other variants that might contribute requires looking for clues in data on the 25,000 other human genes and their surrounding DNA--an overwhelming task for human investigators.