Integrative functional genomics maps synaptic and developmental-regulatory autism risk-gene sets across human cortex

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) risk genes converge on synaptic and developmental regulatory biology, but it remains unclear whether fixed risk-gene sets retain the same functional meaning across prenatal and adult cortical contexts. We analyzed predefined ASD risk-gene sets across BrainSpan developmental transcriptomics, three adult cortical bulk cohorts, fetal and adult single-cell resources, composition-aware bulk models, SynGO and Reactome annotations, matched-random controls, correlation-aware gene-set tests, and STRING physical-interaction networks. The broad SFARI gene set showed the strongest adult cortex ASD-control meta-analytic reduction, driven mainly by its SynGO-annotated synaptic component. This adult signal remained significant in Gandal2022 after donor-aware modeling, donor-level aggregation, mixed-effects modeling, covariate sensitivity analyses, outlier checks, and drop-one-reference composition adjustment. Size-matched gene-level resampling indicated that the signal was not explained by gene-set size alone, whereas expression-matched controls supported a more conservative interpretation involving expression-level background properties. In contrast, the mid-prenatal top-20% SFARI subset localized more strongly to fetal progenitor-to-neurogenic states and chromatin-regulatory Reactome terms but did not show a stable adult cortical ASD-control effect. These results define an adult synaptic ASD-associated layer and a mid-prenatal developmental-regulatory layer within predefined ASD risk-gene sets.