Neural systems approaches to the neurogenetics of autism spectrum disorder?

Despite more than several decades of genetic study, the etiology of autism remains unknown, largely due to the genetic and phenotypic diversity, or heterogeneity, of this disorder, and the lack of biologically based classification systems. At the same time, in the neuroimaging literature, the body of research identifying candidate neural systems underlying aspects of autistic impairment has grown considerably, fuelled by the advent of technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). With the increasing recognition that there may be different "autisms" (Geschwind and Levitt, 2007) with unique neural mechanisms, would the incorporation of neural systems approaches allow for the identification of more biologically informative phenotypes for genetic studies of autism and neuroimaging markers for "neurogenetic" studies of the disorder?