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Saturday, March 14, 2009

Is schizophrenia caused by alterations in gene sets associated with synaptic vesicle recycling, transmitter release and cytoskeletal dynamics?

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Molecular Psychiatry advance online publication 3 March 2009; doi: 10.1038/mp.2009.18

Analysis of gene expression in two large schizophrenia cohorts identifies multiple changes associated with nerve terminal function

P R Maycox1, F Kelly2, A Taylor2, S Bates2, J Reid2, R Logendra3, M R Barnes3, C Larminie3, N Jones2, M Lennon4, C Davies1, J J Hagan1, C A Scorer1, C Angelinetta5, T Akbar5, S Hirsch5, A M Mortimer5,6, T R E Barnes5 and J de Belleroche5

  1. Psychiatry CEDD, New Frontiers Science Park, GlaxoSmithKline, Harlow, Essex, UK
  2. Genetic and Proteomic Sciences, New Frontiers Science Park, GlaxoSmithKline, Harlow, Essex, UK
  3. Computational Biology, New Frontiers Science Park, GlaxoSmithKline, Harlow, Essex, UK
  4. Statistical Sciences, New Frontiers Science Park, GlaxoSmithKline, Harlow, Essex, UK
  5. Division of Neuroscience and Mental Health, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, Hammersmith Hospital, London, UK
  6. Academic Unit of Psychiatry, University of Hull, Hull, UK

Correspondence: Professor J de Belleroche, Neurogenetics Group, Division of Neuroscience and Mental Health, Imperial College London, Hammersmith Hospital Campus, Burlington Danes Building, Du Cane Road, London W12 0NN, UK. E-mail: j.belleroche@imperial.ac.uk

Received 20 October 2008; Revised 27 January 2009; Accepted 28 January 2009; Published online 3 March 2009.

Abstract

Schizophrenia is a severe psychiatric disorder with a world-wide prevalence of 1%. The pathophysiology of the illness is not understood, but is thought to have a strong genetic component with some environmental influences on aetiology. To gain further insight into disease mechanism, we used microarray technology to determine the expression of over 30 000 mRNA transcripts in post-mortem tissue from a brain region associated with the pathophysiology of the disease (Brodmann area 10: anterior prefrontal cortex) in 28 schizophrenic and 23 control patients. We then compared our study (Charing Cross Hospital prospective collection) with that of an independent prefrontal cortex dataset from the Harvard Brain Bank. We report the first direct comparison between two independent studies. A total of 51 gene expression changes have been identified that are common between the schizophrenia cohorts, and 49 show the same direction of disease-associated regulation. In particular, changes were observed in gene sets associated with synaptic vesicle recycling, transmitter release and cytoskeletal dynamics. This strongly suggests multiple, small but synergistic changes in gene expression that affect nerve terminal function.

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1 comment:

  1. UnknownJune 3, 2009 at 7:29 AM

    This is a very interesting paper.
    Unfortunately the authors have not made the primary data available, which is ironic since the authors themselves note that "a major problem is access to basic raw signal intensity data files (.cel) for an informative comparison of published data. This has prevented the application of similar criteria for analysis across datasets and consequently the derivation of any meaningful comparison"

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