Mergers and acquisitions. Invariably, genetic research in neurodevelopmental disorders is moving towards joint analyses of large datasets. While the methodology of meta-analysis is well established for genome-wide association studies, the joint analysis of exome datasets comes with many question marks. Now, a recent paper in PLOS Genetics pioneers the field of joint exome data analysis for association studies in autism. This paper highlights some unexpected facets of rare variant analysis. Continue reading →