This is Fee of Jane and Fee here and welcome to our Friday bonus edition. We're really trying to scour the news horizon for you and for us at the moment to bring you stories of good cheer. And science will save us all.

Never has this been more true. As you all hear, there has been a breakthrough in the understanding

of the genetic makeup of some forms of disability that is proving to be enormously helpful and

transformative for families around the world.

Scientists have made major new advances in understanding a tiny group of genes, which have now

been linked to one of the most common causes of neurodevelopmental disorders worldwide.

Using cutting-edge genome editing, researchers can now identify exactly which genetic

changes cause these conditions and even predict how severe a child's disability might be. The

breakthrough is helping deliver diagnoses to thousands of families and is being hailed as a crucial

step towards targeted treatments for conditions that until recently had no clear explanation.

Well, let's talk to Nikki Witham first, who leads the computational rare disease genomics group at Oxford University's Big Data Institute.

Gosh, does all of that fit on a calling card, Nikki? I hope so.

Can you just put this into layman's terms for us?

Because it's a really significant breakthrough, isn't it? But what does it mean to people?

Yes, so there are thousands of different neurodevelopmental disorders. And for about 50% of them,

we know what the genetic cause is, and for about 50% families currently

don't have an answer.

So us as researchers, we're constantly trying to find the new causes of those neurodevelopmental

disorders.

Now, some genes were identified that had a role in these conditions kind of 10, 20 years ago,

and most of those genes are very, very large genes

that are the instructions to make proteins,

...