RNA-Seq analysis implicates dysregulation of the immune system in schizophrenia

Authors

Junzhe Xu, University at Buffalo
Jingchun Sun, University of Nashville
Jingchun Chen, Virginia Commonwealth UniversityFollow
Lily Wang, Vanderbilt University
Anna Li, New York HealthCare System
Matthew Helm, New York HealthCare System
Steven L. Dubovsky, University at Buffalo
Silviu-Alin Bacanu, Virginia Commonwealth University
Zhongming Zhao, Virginia Commonwealth University
Xiangning Chen, Virginia Commonwealth UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Original Publication Date

2012

Journal/Book/Conference Title

BMC Genomics

Volume

13 (Suppl 8)

DOI of Original Publication

10.1186/1471-2164-13-S8-S2

Comments

Originally published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2164-13-S8-S2

Date of Submission

August 2014

Abstract

Background While genome-wide association studies identified some promising candidates for schizophrenia, the majority of risk genes remained unknown. We were interested in testing whether integration gene expression and other functional information could facilitate the identification of susceptibility genes and related biological pathways.

Results We conducted high throughput sequencing analyses to evaluate mRNA expression in blood samples isolated from 3 schizophrenia patients and 3 healthy controls. We also conducted pooled sequencing of 10 schizophrenic patients and matched controls. Differentially expressed genes were identified by t-test. In the individually sequenced dataset, we identified 198 genes differentially expressed between cases and controls, of them 19 had been verified by the pooled sequencing dataset and 21 reached nominal significance in gene-based association analyses of a genome wide association dataset. Pathway analysis of these differentially expressed genes revealed that they were highly enriched in the immune related pathways. Two genes, S100A8 and TYROBP, had consistent changes in expression in both individual and pooled sequencing datasets and were nominally significant in gene-based association analysis.

Conclusions Integration of gene expression and pathway analyses with genome-wide association may be an efficient approach to identify risk genes for schizophrenia.

Rights

© 2012 Xu et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Is Part Of

VCU Psychiatry Publications