Search

Analysis of whole-genome sequencing data from Iceland and the UK Biobank identifies an excess burden of rare loss-of-function variants in HECTD2 and AKAP11 in individuals diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Why genetic variants that confer risk for psychiatric disorders persist in the genome is an evolutionary conundrum. Here, Mullinset al. report association of polygenic risk for autism with having fewer children and polygenic risk for ADHD with higher reproductive fitness.

Using multi-ancestry genome-wide association study and fine-mapping, 298 loci and 36 credible genes are identified in the aetiology of bipolar disorder.

A new GWAS of schizophrenia (11,260 cases and 24,542 controls) and meta-analysis identifies 50 new associated loci and 145 loci in total. The common variant association signal is highly enriched in mutation-intolerant genes and in regions under strong background selection.

Genome-wide association analyses of 41,917 bipolar disorder cases and 371,549 controls of European ancestry provide new insights into the etiology of this disorder and identify novel therapeutic leads and potential opportunities for drug repurposing.

Genetic risk scores derived from GWAS of psychotic disorders are greater in creative professionals unaffected by psychosis. This association cannot be explained by shared environment or education. Thus, a shared genetic architecture underlies the propensity for creativity and psychosis.

A genome-wide association study including over 76,000 individuals with schizophrenia and over 243,000 control individuals identifies common variant associations at 287 genomic loci, and further fine-mapping analyses highlight the importance of genes involved in synaptic processes.

Genome-wide analysis identifies 30 loci associated with bipolar disorder, allowing for comparisons of shared genes and pathways with other psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia and depression.

A genome-wide association meta-analysis of individuals with clinically assessed or self-reported depression identifies 44 independent risk loci. Comparisons with other psychiatric disorders and candidate gene analyses provide new insights into major depressive disorder.

Patrick Sullivan and colleagues report a multi-stage genome-wide association study for schizophrenia in a Swedish population. They identify 13 loci newly associated with schizophrenia.

The genetics of schizophrenia and other mental disorders are complex and poorly understood, and made even harder to study due to reduced reproduction resulting in negative selection pressure on risk alleles. Two independent large-scale genome wide studies of thousands of patients and controls by two international consortia confirm a previously identified locus, but also reveal novel associations. In this study, de novo (spontaneous) copy number variants are reported on chromosomes 1 and 15.

Rare copy-number variants (CNVs) conferring risk of schizophrenia or autism affect fecundity of carriers in Iceland, and carriers of these CNVs who do not suffer disease or have not been diagnosed with intellectual disability show phenotypes in brain structure and cognitive abilities between those of non-carrier controls and patients with schizophrenia.

Holm, Ivarsdottir, Olafsdottir et al. compare symptoms and physical measures between Icelanders post SARS-CoV-2 infection with uninfected controls. From reported symptoms, they estimate the prevalence of long COVID as 7% at a median of 8 months after infection, while objective differences between cases and controls in the physical measures were few.

Stratified medicine promises to tailor treatment for individual patients, however it remains a major challenge to leverage genetic risk data to aid patient stratification. Here the authors introduce an approach to stratify individuals based on the aggregated impact of their genetic risk factor profiles on tissue-specific gene expression levels, and highlight its ability to identify biologically meaningful and clinically actionable patient subgroups, supporting the notion of different patient ‘biotypes’ characterized by partially distinct disease mechanisms.

Here, in the first of three papers on the genetics of schizophrenia, a genome-wide association study of single nucleotide polymorphisms using data from several large genome-wide scans reveals significant associations to individual loci that implicate perturbations in immunity, brain development, memory and cognition in the predisposition to schizophrenia.

This study uses gene expression predictors for the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and other brain regions to perform a transcriptomic imputation analysis of schizophrenia, identifying 413 genic associations across 13 brain regions and 36 significantly enriched pathways.

Sexual dimorphism in genetic vulnerability to schizophrenia, systemic lupus erythematosus and Sjögren’s syndrome is linked to differential protein abundance from alleles of complement component 4.

Kari Stefansson and colleagues identify a nonsense mutation in RBM12 segregating with psychosis in an extended Icelandic pedigree and an independent frameshift mutation in RBM12 segregating with psychosis in a Finnish family. They further show that carriers of the Icelandic mutation who are unaffected by psychosis exhibit a psychiatric disorder and cognitive test battery profile resembling that of patients with schizophrenia.

Yongyong Shi, Lin He and colleagues report a genome-wide association study for schizophrenia in the Han Chinese population. They identify two new susceptibility loci on 8p12 and 1q24.2.

Depression is correlated with many brain-related traits. Here, Shen et al. perform phenome-wide association studies of a depression polygenic risk score (PRS) and find associations with 51 behavioural and 26 neuroimaging traits which are further followed up on using Mendelian randomization and mediation analyses.

Environmental influences during prenatal development may have implications for health and disease later in life. Here, Czamara et al. assess DNA methylation in cord blood from new-born under various models including environmental and genetic effects individually and their additive or interaction effects.

Relatives of patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis have an unexpectedly high incidence of schizophrenia. Here, the authors show a genetic link between the two conditions, suggesting shared neurobiological mechanisms.

Schizophrenia is a highly heritable genetic disorder, however, identification of specific genetic risk variants has proven difficult because of its complex polygenic nature—a large multi-stage genome-wide association study identifies 128 independent associations in over 100 loci (83 of which are new); key findings include identification of genes involved in glutamergic neurotransmission and support for a link between the immune system and schizophrenia.

A genome-wide-association meta-analysis of 18,381 austim spectrum disorder (ASD) cases and 27,969 controls identifies five risk loci. The authors find quantitative and qualitative polygenic heterogeneity across ASD subtypes.

The Schizophrenia Psychiatric Genome-Wide Association Study Consortium reports five genetic loci newly associated with risk of schizophrenia, involving 17,836 cases of schizophrenia and 33,859 healthy controls. The new locus with the strongest support of association was located within an intron for microRNA 137, a known regulator of neuronal development. Four other genome-wide significant loci for schizophrenia contain predicted targets of MIR137, suggesting that disruption to pathways involving MIR137 may be an etiologic mechanism in schizophrenia.

Simone de Jong et al. examine the balance of common and rare risk for psychiatric disorders in a large family with high incidence of Bipolar Disorder and Major Depressive Disorder. They find that increased polygenic risk over generations could be partially due to assortative mating, which may explain the observation of anticipation in mood disorders.