Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are a range of complex neurodevelopmental disorders that mainly affect behavior and cognition. It is diagnosed by symptoms in two core behavioral dimensions: persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction, and restrictive, repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behavior. ASD is known to be a multifactorial disorder; Cumulative evidence point to environmental and epigenetic changes as the major causes of autism while during the last decade great advances have been made in the identification of ASD-related genes, many of which code for synaptic proteins. One of these is the SHANK3 gene which normally provides scaffolding for signaling molecules in the postsynaptic density. Today, many studies use the SHANK3 model animals in order to study about the autism spectrum disorders. In this work, we present a novel analysis that introduces a new method to visualize the behavioral differences among the model animals with different genotypes, using ultrasonic vocalizations. The vocalization samples were conducted by The Neurobiology Lab at Haifa University and the algorithm was developed in the CRML Lab at the Technion. Our finding shows vivid differences in the rodents' vocalizations, thus shedding light on new aspects of the study of the behavioral differences of the autism spectrum; aspects which have been neglected over the years.
