Recent genetic studies demonstrated that nextgeneration
sequencing (NGS) technology can be a
powerful tool to identify the genetic basis of human diseases,
especially Mendelian disorders [14-16]. Unlike
GWAS that relies on proxy association of genetic variants
with unknown disease causal variants, NGS technology
enables researchers to interrogate the complete
human genome or exome for the detection of both common
and rare variants, hence improving the chance of
finding disease causal variants, given the potential ability
to perform functional annotation on each of the identified
variants. Recently, several studies have been published
to examine the role of whole-exome sequencing
(WES) to identify genetic risk factors for autism.