Cumulative evidence obtained from various sources shows that SEMA5A is a transmembrane protein that has been identified as an autism susceptibility gene in humans according to a genome-wide association study (Weiss et al., 2009), cDNA microarray technology (Melin et al., 2006) and expression quantitative trait locus mapping (Cheng et al., 2013). Here, SEMA5A is linked to autism.