Convergent Canonical Pathways in Autism Spectrum Disorder from Proteomic, Transcriptomic and DNA Methylation Data

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder with extensive genetic and aetiological heterogeneity. While the underlying molecular mechanisms involved remain unclear, significant progress has been facilitated by recent advances in high-throughput transcriptomic, epigenomic and proteomic technologies. Here, we review recently published ASD proteomic data and compare proteomic functional enrichment signatures with those of transcriptomic and epigenomic data. We identify canonical pathways that are consistently implicated in ASD molecular data and find an enrichment of pathways involved in mitochondrial metabolism and neurogenesis. We identify a subset of differentially expressed proteins that are supported by ASD transcriptomic and DNA methylation data. Furthermore, these differentially expressed proteins are enriched for disease phenotype pathways associated with ASD aetiology. These proteins converge on protein-protein interaction networks that regulate cell proliferation and differentiation, metabolism, and inflammation, which demonstrates a link between canonical pathways, biological processes and the ASD phenotype. This review highlights how proteomics can uncover potential molecular mechanisms to explain a link between mitochondrial dysfunction and neurodevelopmental pathology.