Modeling autism spectrum disorder: three main approaches.

Autism spectrum disorder is a highly “humanized” and heterogenous pathology characterized by deficits in both social behaviours and cognitive functions; therefore, modelling it, is still a hard challenge. The goal of this thesis is to compare three different approaches useful to model autism spectrum disorder. While mouse models are very-well suited to model ASD correlated to monogenic pathologies (such as X-fragile syndrome), iPSCs and iPSCs-derived organoids are useful to model autism when is not correlated to any other diseases, since they recapitulate every characteristic - genetic, epigenetic, environmental - related to the specific patient. By exploiting benefits and drawbacks of these techniques and comparing them, three different examples of scientific findings related to the three different modelling techniques (mouse model, iPSCs and iPSCs-derived organoids) have been provided. ​