UCL Discovery
UCL home » Library Services » Electronic resources » UCL Discovery

Accurately assessing the risk of schizophrenia conferred by rare copy-number variation affecting genes with brain function

Raychaudhuri, S; Korn, JM; McCarroll, SA; International Schizophrenia, C; Altshuler, D; Sklar, P; Purcell, S; (2010) Accurately assessing the risk of schizophrenia conferred by rare copy-number variation affecting genes with brain function. PLoS Genetics , 6 (9) , Article e1001097. 10.1371/journal.pgen.1001097. Green open access

[thumbnail of journal.pgen.1001097.pdf]
Preview
PDF
journal.pgen.1001097.pdf

Download (397kB)

Abstract

Investigators have linked rare copy number variation (CNVs) to neuropsychiatric diseases, such as schizophrenia. One hypothesis is that CNV events cause disease by affecting genes with specific brain functions. Under these circumstances, we expect that CNV events in cases should impact brain-function genes more frequently than those events in controls. Previous publications have applied "pathway" analyses to genes within neuropsychiatric case CNVs to show enrichment for brain-functions. While such analyses have been suggestive, they often have not rigorously compared the rates of CNVs impacting genes with brain function in cases to controls, and therefore do not address important confounders such as the large size of brain genes and overall differences in rates and sizes of CNVs. To demonstrate the potential impact of confounders, we genotyped rare CNV events in 2,415 unaffected controls with Affymetrix 6.0; we then applied standard pathway analyses using four sets of brain-function genes and observed an apparently highly significant enrichment for each set. The enrichment is simply driven by the large size of brain-function genes. Instead, we propose a case-control statistical test, cnv-enrichment-test, to compare the rate of CNVs impacting specific gene sets in cases versus controls. With simulations, we demonstrate that cnv-enrichment-test is robust to case-control differences in CNV size, CNV rate, and systematic differences in gene size. Finally, we apply cnv-enrichment-test to rare CNV events published by the International Schizophrenia Consortium (ISC). This approach reveals nominal evidence of case-association in neuronal-activity and the learning gene sets, but not the other two examined gene sets. The neuronal-activity genes have been associated in a separate set of schizophrenia cases and controls; however, testing in independent samples is necessary to definitively confirm this association. Our method is implemented in the PLINK software package.

Type: Article
Title: Accurately assessing the risk of schizophrenia conferred by rare copy-number variation affecting genes with brain function
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1001097
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1001097
Language: English
Additional information: © 2010 Raychaudhuri et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Keywords: Brain/*physiopathology Case-Control Studies Computer Simulation DNA Copy Number Variations/*genetics Databases, Genetic Gene Deletion Genes/*genetics *Genetic Predisposition to Disease Genome, Human/genetics Humans Models, Genetic Risk Assessment Schizophrenia/*genetics/*physiopathology
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Division of Psychiatry
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences > Genetics, Evolution and Environment
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > UCL GOS Institute of Child Health
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > UCL GOS Institute of Child Health > Genetics and Genomic Medicine Dept
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1395476
Downloads since deposit
107Downloads
Download activity - last month
Download activity - last 12 months
Downloads by country - last 12 months

Archive Staff Only

View Item View Item