Autism post-mortem neuroinformatic resource: the autism tissue program (ATP) informatics portal.

Hubert et al. (2007) built a free website called the Autism Tissue Program (ATP) portal.

Families can register their loved one as a future brain donor. Scientists can log in, search donor histories, and request tiny slices of post-mortem brain tissue.

Before this, you had to email labs one by one and wait months to see if tissue was left.

The portal went live with hundreds of donors and full medical records.

Researchers could run a quick query like “male, age 20-30, no seizure meds” and see instantly what tissue was ready to ship.

Richman et al. (2001) came first. That team showed how to scan an autistic brain with MRI before anyone touched it. Their protocol created the 3-D map that later gets stored in the ATP portal, so the two papers form a tidy pipeline from scanner to shipping box.

Ch'ng et al. (2015) pooled gene-expression chips from many brain banks. Most of the autism samples in that meta-analysis were downloaded through the ATP portal, proving the database actually speeds up big discoveries.

Storch et al. (2012) counted microglia in ATP brains and found more immune cells in autism cortex. The 2007 portal paper doesn’t look at microglia, but without the portal that later study would have had no tissue to count.

If you ever refer a family for brain donation, you now know where the tissue lands. The ATP portal keeps diagnoses, medications, and even last cognitive scores in one place. When a parent asks, “Will my child’s gift help science?” you can say yes and point to concrete studies like Ch'ng et al. (2015) that mined the same data. No therapy tips here—just a faster route from donor to discovery.