bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.06.03.446920; this version posted June 3, 2021. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. 1 TITLE 2 Identifying developing interneurons as a potential target for multiple genetic 3 autism risk factors in human and rodent forebrain. 4 5 AUTHORS/AFFILIATIONS 6 Yifei Yang1,2, Sam A. Booker1,2, James M. Clegg1,2, Idoia Quintana Urzainqui1,2, 7 Anna Sumera1,2, Zrinko Kozic1,2, Owen Dando1,2, Sandra Martin Lorenzo3, Yann 8 Herault3, Peter C. Kind1,2, David J. Price1,2, Thomas Pratt1,2, * 9 1Simons Initiative for the Developing Brain, 10 2Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences, 11 Hugh Robson Building, Edinburgh Medical School Biomedical Sciences, 12 The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, EH8 9XD, United Kingdom. 13 3Université de Strasbourg, CNRS, INSERM, Institut de Génétique et de Biologie 14 Moléculaire et Cellulaire, IGBMC, 1 rue Laurent Fries, 67404 Illkirch, France 15 16 CONTACT INFO 17 *Correspondence :
[email protected] 18 19 ABSTRACT 20 Autism spectrum condition or ‘autism’ is associated with numerous monogenic and 21 polygenic genetic risk factors including the polygenic 16p11.2 microdeletion. A central 22 question is what neural cells are affected. To systematically investigate we analysed 23 single cell transcriptomes from gestational week (GW) 8-26 human foetal prefrontal 24 cortex and identified a subset of interneurons (INs) first appearing at GW23 with 25 enriched expression of a disproportionately large fraction of risk factor transcripts.