The authors analyzed variants in the conserved regions of the 3′ UTR of the MeCP2 gene in patients with autism, schizophrenia and other psychiatric diseases and found that in the case of autistic patients the frequency of mutations was higher among affected individuals than among controls, suggesting that the untranslated tail of this gene could be implicated in ASD. The gene discussed is MECP2; the disease is schizophrenia.