SLC6A4 and autism: Nevertheless, we observed a nominal increase in rare ‘functional’ variants in the discovery case sample vs. controls, and this prompted us to: (1) conduct functional studies of the novel variants found in ASD cases for effects on SERT; and (2) subsequently compare the putative increase of rare, ‘functional’ variants in ASD cases to data from exome sequence that became available from the NIH ARRA Autism Sequencing Consortium [50,52].