ABSTRACT
Objective:To detect differentiallyexpressed microRNAs (miRNAs)in plasma of schizophrenia and explore biomarker for diagnosis of schizophrenia.Methods:The discovery cohort tincluded 6 patients with schizophrenia meeting diagnostic criteria of schizophrenia of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disor-der,Fourth Edition (DSM-IV),as well as 6 healthy control subjects,whose age and gender were matched to pa-tients.The expression of 754 miRNAs (Sanger human miRBase v14)in the discovery cohort was investigated by Taqman Array (Human MicroRNA A +B Cards Set v3.0).Then the quantitative reverse-transcription polymor-phism chain reaction (qRT-PCR)assay was conducted to validate differentially expressed miRNAs in an independ-ent replication cohort,which included 25 schizophrenia patients and 18 healthy control subjects.The student's t-tests were used to analyze the differential expression of miRNA between schizophrenia patients and controls.All analyses were performed in Significance Analysis of Microarrays (SAM)software.Results:Twenty down-regulated miRNAs were observed in discovery cohort.Four miRNAs,hsa-miR-15b-5p were down-regulated in both discovery and rep-licated cohorts.Conclusion:The present study suggests that aberrant expression of miRNA might be of potential im-portance as biomarkers in the diagnosis of schizophrenia.