Evidence map›Paper›PMID 42443147›Full record

ArticleTranslational psychiatry2026

Mapping lncRNAs onto multilevel mRNA co‑expression modules in autism.

Chen-Ling Lee, Geng-Ming Hu, Yi-Pei Li, Te-Lun Mai

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Article in Translational psychiatry, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.

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1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

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3 · Its place in the literature

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4 · The record

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5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

4 authors.

Chen-Ling LeeDepartment of Life Science, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
Geng-Ming HuDepartment of Physics, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan.ORCID http://orcid.org/0009-0007-3439-8925
Yi-Pei LiDepartment of Life Science, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
Te-Lun MaiDepartment of Life Science, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan. tlmai@ntu.edu.tw.ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9356-6198

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) involves heterogeneous genetic and transcriptomic alterations, but how these changes are organized across hierarchical co-expression scales and linked to long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) remains incompletely understood. Here, we present Minimum Span Clustering Network (MSCN), an unsupervised, deterministic framework that constructs traceable multilevel mRNA co-expression hierarchies without requiring soft-thresholding powers, fixed module numbers, cut heights, or stochastic initialization. Applied to two independent ASD brain transcriptome cohorts, MSCN reveals hierarchical gene modules across four resolution levels, enabling the detection of transcriptional patterns ranging from low-level, specific signals to high-level, broader biological pathways. We uncovered modules enriched in neuronal/axonal, developmental, and immune-related pathways, reflecting interconnected neurodevelopmental and immune-dysregulation programs in ASD. Cross-method comparisons showed that MSCN complements WGCNA and MEGENA by preserving biologically concordant modules while providing an explicit parent-child hierarchy; simulation and benchmark analyses supported comparable module recovery, preservation, and enrichment performance. By mapping lncRNAs to MSCN-derived mRNA modules, we identified lncRNAs associated with ASD-related mRNA modules and evaluated them as candidate statistical mediators in downstream transcription factor (TF)-lncRNA-mRNA analyses. This analysis identified over 11,000 candidate TF-lncRNA-mRNA axes, including 644 axes involving 46 SFARI score 1 or 2 genes, four of which were syndromic genes, and 12 named lncRNA mediators. External transcriptomic evaluation further supported 789 axes, including representative HIF1A-STXBP5-AS1-CADPS, E2F1-PART1-SCN2A, and RELA-RFPL1S-GRIN2A relationships. Together, these findings establish MSCN as a scalable framework for decomposing ASD mRNA co-expression architecture, provide a hypothesis-generating resource linking coding and noncoding transcriptomic alterations, and help prioritize these relationships for future validation.

Indexed as

Autism Spectrum DisorderAutistic DisorderGene Regulatory NetworksRNA, Long NoncodingRNA, MessengerCluster AnalysisGene Expression ProfilingHumansTranscriptomeRNA, Long NoncodingRNA, Messenger

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.