Genetic variants in the 22q11 gene ZDHHC8, which encodes a putative transmembrane palmitoyltransferase, has been associated to schizophrenia in family-based linkage disequilibrium (LD) studies. The single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs175174 (A/G), which had the strongest association, has been shown recently to regulate the level of the fully functional transcript by modulating the retention of intron 4 of ZDHHC8. In this work, we genotyped three genetic variants within the ZDHHC8 locus and conducted association studies in both population- and family-based samples of the Han Chinese population. The three polymorphisms spanning approximately 5.5 Kb were detected to be in significant LD. Our results provided compelling supportive evidence for association of the variants within the ZDHHC8 locus with schizophrenia but revealed different risk allele at SNP rs175174. The G allele was significantly more common in cases than in controls (69.47 : 59.96%; P=0.000018) and excess transmission of the same allele was confirmed in the family-based transmission disequilibrium test (transmitted/non-transmitted=87 : 54; P=0.0055). Both sample sets even shared the same risk haplotype with similar frequency. Our current data presents consistent association results obtained from both case-control and family-based samples in a same laboratory under the same experimental condition. Despite the potential genetic heterogeneity, our independent findings further support that the 22q11 region is likely to harbor candidate schizophrenia susceptibility genes.

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Racial and ethnic disparities in malignancies attract extensive attention. To investigate whether there are racial and ethnic disparities in genetic alteration between Caucasian and Eastern Asian population, data from several prospective AML trials were retrospectively analyzed in this study. We found that there were more patients with core binding factor (CBF) leukemia in Eastern Asian cohorts and there were different CBF leukemia constitutions between them. The ratios of CBF leukemia are 27.7, 22.1, 21.1, and 23.4%, respectively, in our (ChiCTR-TRC-10001202), another Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Eastern Asian cohorts, which are significantly higher than those in ECOG1900, MRC AML15, UK NCRI AML17, HOVON/SAKK AML-42, and German AML2003 (15.5, 12.5, 9.3, 10.2, and 12%, respectively). And CBFbeta-MYH11 occurred more prevalently in HOVON/SAKK AML- 42 and ECOG1900 trials (50.0 and 54.3% of CBF leukemia, respectively) than in Chinese and Japanese trials (20.1 and 20.8%, respectively). The proportion of FLT3-ITD mutation is 11.2% in our cohort, which is lower than that in MRC AML15 and UK NCRI AML17 (24.6 and 17.9%, respectively). Even after excluding the age bias, there are still different incidence rates of mutation between Caucasian and Eastern Asian population. These data suggest that there are racial and ethnic disparities in genetic alteration between Caucasian and Eastern Asian population.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s13045-018-0566-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.