de novo mutations
Exploring the Complex Genetics of Schizophrenia
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Credit: Jonathan Bailey, National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH
Schizophrenia is one of the most prevalent, tragic, and frustrating of all human illnesses, affecting about 1% of the human population, or 2.4 million Americans [1]. Decades of research have failed to provide a clear cause in most cases, but family clustering has suggested that inheritance must play some role. Over the last five years, multiple research projects known as genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified dozens of common variations in the human genome associated with increased risk of schizophrenia [2]. However, the individual effects of these variants are weak, and it’s often not been clear which genes were actually affected by the variations. Now, advances in DNA sequencing technology have made it possible to move beyond these association studies to study the actual DNA sequence of the protein-coding region of the entire genome for thousands of individuals with schizophrenia. Reports just published have revealed a complex constellation of rare mutations that point to specific genes—at least in certain cases.
