Pathways-based analyses of whole-genome association study data in bipolar disorder reveal genes mediating ion channel activity and synaptic neurotransmission
Abstract:Despite known heritability, the complex genetic architecture of bipolar disorder (likely including trait, locus and allelic heterogeneity, as well as genetic interactions) has confounded genetic discovery for many years. Even modern day whole genome association studies (WGAS) using over half a million common SNPs have implicated only a handful of genes at the genomewide level. Temporally coincident with this series of WGAS, a host of pathways-based analyses (PBAs) have emerged as novel computational approaches… Show more
“…Increasing evidence suggests that common genetic risk variants for psychiatric disorders are not distributed randomly but rather lie among sets of genes with overlapping functions (19)(20)(21)(22). Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) is a data analytical approach that leverages a priori knowledge to gain insight into the biological functions of genes and pathways in the analysis of genetic data (23,24).…”
Significance
This study combines neuroimaging and whole-genome genotyping techniques with a gene set enrichment analysis to unravel the genetic basis of a well-validated intermediate phenotype for schizophrenia, dorsolateral prefrontal cortexâhippocampal connectivity. We found significant enrichment of genes with roles in synaptic plasticity and neurodevelopment that are consistent with the neurobiological basis of prefrontalâhippocampal interactions in schizophrenia. We further provide additional independent evidence for the intermediate phenotype concept and present a readily generalizable approach for a biologically driven analysis of imaging and genetic data.
“…Increasing evidence suggests that common genetic risk variants for psychiatric disorders are not distributed randomly but rather lie among sets of genes with overlapping functions (19)(20)(21)(22). Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) is a data analytical approach that leverages a priori knowledge to gain insight into the biological functions of genes and pathways in the analysis of genetic data (23,24).…”
Significance
This study combines neuroimaging and whole-genome genotyping techniques with a gene set enrichment analysis to unravel the genetic basis of a well-validated intermediate phenotype for schizophrenia, dorsolateral prefrontal cortexâhippocampal connectivity. We found significant enrichment of genes with roles in synaptic plasticity and neurodevelopment that are consistent with the neurobiological basis of prefrontalâhippocampal interactions in schizophrenia. We further provide additional independent evidence for the intermediate phenotype concept and present a readily generalizable approach for a biologically driven analysis of imaging and genetic data.
“…Many groups have been developing pathway-based approaches to analyzing genome-wide association datasets and our SNP-ratio test (SRT) is just one such approach. [7][8][9][10][11][12][13] The SRT can be applied flexibly to different pathway resources as a hypothesis-free test, which simply identifies whether there are more nominally significant SNPs in genes mapping to that pathway in cases in a GWAS dataset than to genes mapping to all other indicated pathways. 7 Applying this approach to the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) database of 212 experimentally-derived pathways we captured information on 4,760 genes.…”
“…A number of formal pathway-based analytical methods have been described previously [6][7][8][9][10][11] and are reviewed elsewhere. 9,12 In this study, we used the SNP ratio test (SRT) 10 for the following reasons.…”
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