Serious mental illnesses have long been sorted into separate diagnostic boxes, yet they cluster stubbornly within the same families. Researchers examined 173 multiplex families from the Portuguese Island Collection, drawn from the genetically isolated Azores and Madeira. In 28 percent of those families, psychosis and mood disorders co-segregated; in 7 percent, autism and intellectual disability joined the same pedigree. Whole-genome sequencing of one three-generation family uncovered an ultra-rare loss-of-function mutation in CHD2 that appeared as schizophrenia in most carriers and as autism in another. The work argues that founder-population families can expose rare, large-effect variants spanning the diagnostic spectrum.

Imagine you poll your friends on how many minutes per pound to roast a turkey. Five respond with 15 minutes; one answers 33 minutes.

The most popular model of conformity, the French-Harary-DeGroot model (or commonly, Degroot Model), assumes that you would carefully weigh all six recommendations, calculating a cooking time of 18 minutes per pound. But under a model of conformity previously published by SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Kaleda Denton and colleagues, you would disregard the outlier and move ahead with 15.

In a paper published in [month TK] in Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, Denton, SFI External Professor Marcus Feldman, and independent researcher Jonathan F. Johannemann build on this previous theoretical modeling work by testing the model against real-world data.