Hannon, E;
Dempster, E;
Viana, J;
Burrage, J;
Smith, AR;
Macdonald, R;
St Clair, D;
... Mill, J; + view all
(2016)
An integrated genetic-epigenetic analysis of schizophrenia: evidence for co-localization of genetic associations and differential DNA methylation.
Genome Biology
, 17
, Article 176. 10.1186/s13059-016-1041-x.
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Abstract
BACKGROUND: Schizophrenia is a highly heritable, neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by episodic psychosis and altered cognitive function. Despite success in identifying genetic variants associated with schizophrenia, there remains uncertainty about the causal genes involved in disease pathogenesis and how their function is regulated. RESULTS: We performed a multi-stage epigenome-wide association study, quantifying genome-wide patterns of DNA methylation in a total of 1714 individuals from three independent sample cohorts. We have identified multiple differentially methylated positions and regions consistently associated with schizophrenia across the three cohorts; these effects are independent of important confounders such as smoking. We also show that epigenetic variation at multiple loci across the genome contributes to the polygenic nature of schizophrenia. Finally, we show how DNA methylation quantitative trait loci in combination with Bayesian co-localization analyses can be used to annotate extended genomic regions nominated by studies of schizophrenia, and to identify potential regulatory variation causally involved in disease. CONCLUSIONS: This study represents the first systematic integrated analysis of genetic and epigenetic variation in schizophrenia, introducing a methodological approach that can be used to inform epigenome-wide association study analyses of other complex traits and diseases. We demonstrate the utility of using a polygenic risk score to identify molecular variation associated with etiological variation, and of using DNA methylation quantitative trait loci to refine the functional and regulatory variation associated with schizophrenia risk variants. Finally, we present strong evidence for the co-localization of genetic associations for schizophrenia and differential DNA methylation.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | An integrated genetic-epigenetic analysis of schizophrenia: evidence for co-localization of genetic associations and differential DNA methylation |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1186/s13059-016-1041-x |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13059-016-1041-x |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2016 The Author(s). Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. |
| Keywords: | Science & Technology, Life Sciences & Biomedicine, Biotechnology & Applied Microbiology, Genetics & Heredity, Schizophrenia, DNA methylation, Epigenetics, Genetics, Polygenic risk score (PRS), Genome-wide association study (GWAS), Epigenome-wide association study (EWAS), METHYLOME-WIDE ASSOCIATION, HUMAN BRAIN-TISSUE, CELL-TYPES, GENOTYPE IMPUTATION, DISEASE, GENOME, RISK, BLOOD, LOCI, INFECTION |
| 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 |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1514953 |
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