Whole-exome sequencing in a Chinese sample provides preliminary evidence for the link between rare/low-frequency immune-related variants and early-onset schizophrenia.

Rare and low-frequency variants contribute to schizophrenia (SCZ), and may influence its age-at-onset (AAO). We examined the association of rare or low-frequency deleterious coding variants in Chinese patients with SCZ. We collected DNA samples in 197 patients with SCZ spectrum disorder and 82 healthy controls (HC), and performed exome sequencing. The AAO variable was ascertained in the majority of SCZ participants for identify the early-onset (EOS, AAO<=18) and adult-onset (AOS, AAO>18) subgroups. We examined the overall association of rare/low-frequency, damaging variants in SCZ versus HC, EOS versus HC, and AOS versus HC at the gene and gene-set levels using Sequence Kernel Association Test. The quantitative rare-variant association test of AAO was conducted. Resampling was used to obtain empirical p-values and to control for family-wise error rate (FWER). In binary-trait association tests, we identified 5 potential candidate risk genes and 10 gene ontology biological processes (GOBP) terms, among which PADI2 reached FWER-adjusted significance. In quantitative rare-variant association tests, we found marginally significant correlations of AAO with alterations in 4 candidate risk genes, and 5 GOBP pathways. Together, the biological and functional profiles of these genes and gene sets supported the involvement of perturbations of neural systems in SCZ, and altered immune functions in EOS.

Mendelian randomization: causal inference leveraging genetic data.

Mendelian randomization (MR) leverages genetic information to examine the causal relationship between phenotypes allowing for the presence of unmeasured confounders. MR has been widely applied to unresolved questions in epidemiology, making use of summary statistics from genome-wide association studies on an increasing number of human traits. However, an understanding of essential concepts is necessary for the appropriate application and interpretation of MR. This review aims to provide a non-technical overview of MR and demonstrate its relevance to psychiatric research. We begin with the origins of MR and the reasons for its recent expansion, followed by an overview of its statistical methodology. We then describe the limitations of MR, and how these are being addressed by recent methodological advances. We showcase the practical use of MR in psychiatry through three illustrative examples - the connection between cannabis use and psychosis, the link between intelligence and schizophrenia, and the search for modifiable risk factors for depression. The review concludes with a discussion of the prospects of MR, focusing on the integration of multi-omics data and its extension to delineating complex causal networks.

Association of neurotransmitter pathway polygenic risk with specific symptom profiles in psychosis.

A primary goal of psychiatry is to better understand the pathways that link genetic risk to psychiatric symptoms. Here, we tested association of diagnosis and endophenotypes with overall and neurotransmitter pathway-specific polygenic risk in patients with early-stage psychosis. Subjects included 205 demographically diverse cases with a psychotic disorder who underwent comprehensive psychiatric and neurological phenotyping and 115 matched controls. Following genotyping, we calculated polygenic scores (PGSs) for schizophrenia (SZ) and bipolar disorder (BP) using Psychiatric Genomics Consortium GWAS summary statistics. To test if overall genetic risk can be partitioned into affected neurotransmitter pathways, we calculated pathway PGSs (pPGSs) for SZ risk affecting each of four major neurotransmitter systems: glutamate, GABA, dopamine, and serotonin. Psychosis subjects had elevated SZ PGS versus controls; cases with SZ or BP diagnoses had stronger SZ or BP risk, respectively. There was no significant association within psychosis cases between individual symptom measures and overall PGS. However, neurotransmitter-specific pPGSs were moderately associated with specific endophenotypes; notably, glutamate was associated with SZ diagnosis and with deficits in cognitive control during task-based fMRI, while dopamine was associated with global functioning. Finally, unbiased endophenotype-driven clustering identified three diagnostically mixed case groups that separated on primary deficits of positive symptoms, negative symptoms, global functioning, and cognitive control. All clusters showed strong genome-wide risk. Cluster 2, characterized by deficits in cognitive control and negative symptoms, additionally showed specific risk concentrated in glutamatergic and GABAergic pathways. Due to the intensive characterization of our subjects, the present study was limited to a relatively small cohort. As such, results should be followed up with additional research at the population and mechanism level. Our study suggests pathway-based PGS analysis may be a powerful path forward to study genetic mechanisms driving psychiatric endophenotypes.

Bidirectional two-sample Mendelian randomization study of differential white blood cell counts and schizophrenia.

BACKGROUND: Schizophrenia and white blood cell counts (WBC) are both complex and polygenic traits. Previous evidence suggests that increased WBC are associated with higher all-cause mortality, and other studies have found elevated WBC in first-episode psychosis and chronic schizophrenia. However, these observational findings may be confounded by antipsychotic exposures and their effects on WBC. Mendelian randomization (MR) is a useful method for examining the directions of genetically-predicted relationships between schizophrenia and WBC. METHODS: We performed a two-sample MR using summary statistics from genome-wide association studies (GWAS) conducted by the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium Schizophrenia Workgroup (N = 130,644) and the Blood Cell Consortium (N = 563,946). The MR methods included inverse variance weighted (IVW), MR Egger, weighted median, MR-PRESSO, contamination mixture, and a novel approach called mixture model reciprocal causal inference (MRCI). False discovery rate was employed to correct for multiple testing. RESULTS: Multiple MR methods supported bidirectional genetically-predicted relationships between lymphocyte count and schizophrenia: IVW (b = 0.026; FDR p-value = 0.008), MR Egger (b = 0.026; FDR p-value = 0.008), weighted median (b = 0.013; FDR p-value = 0.049), and MR-PRESSO (b = 0.014; FDR p-value = 0.010) in the forward direction, and IVW (OR = 1.100; FDR p-value = 0.021), MR Egger (OR = 1.231; FDR p-value < 0.001), weighted median (OR = 1.136; FDR p-value = 0.006) and MRCI (OR = 1.260; FDR p-value = 0.026) in the reverse direction. MR Egger (OR = 1.171; FDR p-value < 0.001) and MRCI (OR = 1.154; FDR p-value = 0.026) both suggested genetically-predicted eosinophil count is associated with schizophrenia, but MR Egger (b = 0.060; FDR p-value = 0.010) and contamination mixture (b = -0.013; FDR p-value = 0.045) gave ambiguous results on whether genetically predicted liability to schizophrenia would be associated with eosinophil count. MR Egger (b = 0.044; FDR p-value = 0.010) and MR-PRESSO (b = 0.009; FDR p-value = 0.045) supported genetically predicted liability to schizophrenia is associated with elevated monocyte count, and the opposite direction was also indicated by MR Egger (OR = 1.231; FDR p-value = 0.045). Lastly, unidirectional genetic liability from schizophrenia to neutrophil count were proposed by MR-PRESSO (b = 0.011; FDR p-value = 0.028) and contamination mixture (b = 0.011; FDR p-value = 0.045) method. CONCLUSION: This MR study utilised multiple MR methods to obtain results suggesting bidirectional genetic genetically-predicted relationships for elevated lymphocyte counts and schizophrenia risk. In addition, moderate evidence also showed bidirectional genetically-predicted relationships between schizophrenia and monocyte counts, and unidirectional effect from genetic liability for eosinophil count to schizophrenia and from genetic liability for schizophrenia to neutrophil count. The influence of schizophrenia to eosinophil count is less certain. Our findings support the role of WBC in schizophrenia and concur with the hypothesis of neuroinflammation in schizophrenia.

Early-onset schizophrenia is associated with immune-related rare variants in a Chinese sample.

Background: Rare variants are likely to contribute to schizophrenia (SCZ), given the large discrepancy between the heritability estimated from twin and GWAS studies. Furthermore, the nature of the rare-variant contribution to SCZ may vary with the "age-at-onset" (AAO), since early-onset has been suggested as being indicative of neurodevelopment deviance. Objective: To examine the association of rare deleterious coding variants in early- and adult-onset SCZ in a Chinese sample. Method: Exome sequencing was performed on DNA from 197 patients with SCZ spectrum disorder and 82 healthy controls (HC) of Chinese ancestry recruited in Hong Kong. We also gathered AAO information in the majority of SCZ samples. Patients were classified into early-onset (EOS, AAO<18) and adult-onset (AOS, AAO>18). We collapsed the rare variants to improve statistical power and examined the overall association of rare variants in SCZ versus HC, EOS versus HC, and AOS versus HC at the gene and gene-set levels by Sequence Kernel Association Test. The quantitative rare-variant association test of AAO was also conducted. We focused on variants which were predicted to have a medium or high impact on the protein-encoding process as defined by Ensembl. We applied a 100000-time permutation test to obtain empirical p-values, with significance threshold set at p < 1e -3 to control family-wise error rates. Moreover, we compared the burden of targeted rare variants in significant risk genes and gene sets in cases and controls. Results: Based on several binary-trait association tests (i.e., SCZ vs HC, EOS vs HC and AOS vs HC), we identified 7 candidate risk genes and 20 gene ontology biological processes (GOBP) terms, which exhibited higher burdens in SCZ than in controls. Based on quantitative rare-variant association tests, we found that alterations in 5 candidate risk genes and 7 GOBP pathways were significantly correlated with AAO. Based on biological and functional profiles of the candidate risk genes and gene sets, our findings suggested that, in addition to the involvement of perturbations in neural systems in SCZ in general, altered immune responses may be specifically implicated in EOS. Conclusion: Disrupted immune responses may exacerbate abnormal perturbations during neurodevelopment and trigger the early onset of SCZ. We provided evidence of rare variants increasing SCZ risk in the Chinese population.

Pathway-Specific Polygenic Scores Improve Cross-Ancestry Prediction of Psychosis and Clinical Outcomes.

Psychotic disorders are debilitating conditions with disproportionately high public health burden. Genetic studies indicate high heritability, but current polygenic scores (PGS) account for only a fraction of variance in psychosis risk. PGS often show poor portability across ancestries, performing significantly worse in non-European populations. Pathway-specific PGS (pPGS), which restrict PGS to genomic locations within distinct biological units, could lead to increased mechanistic understanding of pathways that lead to risk and improve cross-ancestry prediction by reducing noise in genetic predictors. This study examined the predictive power of genome-wide PGS and nine pathway-specific pPGS in a unique Chinese-ancestry sample of deeply-phenotyped psychosis patients and non-psychiatric controls. We found strong evidence for the involvement of schizophrenia-associated risk variants within "nervous system development" (p=2.5e-4) and "regulation of neuron differentiation" pathways (p=3.0e-4) in predicting risk for psychosis. We also found the "ion channel complex" pPGS, with weights derived from GWAS of bipolar disorder, to be strongly associated with the number of inpatient psychiatry admissions a patient experiences (p=1.5e-3) and account for a majority of the signal in the overall bipolar PGS. Importantly, although the schizophrenia genome-wide PGS alone explained only 3.7% of the variance in liability to psychosis in this Chinese ancestry sample, the addition of the schizophrenia-weighted pPGS for "nervous system development" and "regulation of neuron differentiation" increased the variance explained to 6.9%, which is on-par with the predictive power of PGS in European ancestry samples. Thus, not only can pPGS provide greater insight into mechanisms underlying genetic risk for disease and clinical outcomes, but may also improve cross-ancestry risk prediction accuracy.

Association of neurotransmitter pathway polygenic risk with specific symptom profiles in psychosis.

A primary goal of psychiatry is to better understand the pathways that link genetic risk to psychiatric symptoms. Here, we tested association of diagnosis and endophenotypes with overall and neurotransmitter pathway-specific polygenic risk in patients with early-stage psychosis. Subjects included 206 demographically diverse cases with a psychotic disorder who underwent comprehensive psychiatric and neurological phenotyping and 115 matched controls. Following genotyping, we calculated polygenic scores (PGSs) for schizophrenia (SZ) and bipolar disorder (BP) using Psychiatric Genomics Consortium GWAS summary statistics. To test if overall genetic risk can be partitioned into affected neurotransmitter pathways, we calculated pathway PGSs (pPGSs) for SZ risk affecting each of four major neurotransmitter systems: glutamate, GABA, dopamine, and serotonin. Psychosis subjects had elevated SZ PGS versus controls; cases with SZ or BP diagnoses had stronger SZ or BP risk, respectively. There was no significant association within psychosis cases between individual symptom measures and overall PGS. However, neurotransmitter-specific pPGSs were moderately associated with specific endophenotypes; notably, glutamate was associated with SZ diagnosis and with deficits in cognitive control during task-based fMRI, while dopamine was associated with global functioning. Finally, unbiased endophenotype-driven clustering identified three diagnostically mixed case groups that separated on primary deficits of positive symptoms, negative symptoms, global functioning, and cognitive control. All clusters showed strong genome-wide risk. Cluster 2, characterized by deficits in cognitive control and negative symptoms, additionally showed specific risk concentrated in glutamatergic and GABAergic pathways. Due to the intensive characterization of our subjects, the present study was limited to a relatively small cohort. As such, results should be followed up with additional research at the population and mechanism level. Our study suggests pathway-based PGS analysis may be a powerful path forward to study genetic mechanisms driving psychiatric endophenotypes.

Preliminary Evidence for Genetic Nurture in Depression and Neuroticism Through Polygenic Scores.

Importance: Modeling genetic nurture (ie, the effects of parental genotypes through influences on the environment experienced by their children) is essential to accurately disentangle genetic and environmental influences on phenotypic variance. However, these influences are often ignored in both epidemiologic and genetic studies of depression. Objective: To estimate the association of genetic nurture with depression and neuroticism. Design, Setting, and Participants: This cross-sectional study jointly modeled parental and offspring polygenic scores (PGSs) across 9 traits to test for the association of genetic nurture with lifetime broad depression and neuroticism using data from nuclear families in the UK Biobank, with data collected between 2006 and 2019. A broad depression phenotype was measured in 38 702 offspring from 20 905 independent nuclear families, with most of these participants also reporting neuroticism scores. Parental genotypes were imputed from sibships or parent-offspring duos and used to calculate parental PGSs. Data were analyzed between March 2021 and January 2023. Main Outcomes and Measures: Estimates of genetic nurture and direct genetic regression coefficients on broad depression and neuroticism. Results: This study of 38 702 offspring with data on broad depression (mean [SD] age, 55.5 [8.2] years at study entry; 58% female) found limited preliminary evidence for a statistically significant association of genetic nurture with lifetime depression and neuroticism in adults. The estimated regression coefficient of the parental depression PGS on offspring neuroticism (ß = 0.04, SE = 0.02, P = 6.63 × 10-3) was estimated to be approximately two-thirds (66%) that of the offspring's depression PGS (ß = 0.06, SE = 0.01, P = 6.13 × 10-11). Evidence for an association between parental cannabis use disorder PGS and offspring depression was also found (ß = 0.08, SE = 0.03, P = .02), which was estimated to be 2 times greater than the association between the offspring's cannabis use disorder PGS and their own depression status (ß = 0.04, SE = 0.02, P = .07). Conclusions and Relevance: The results of this cross-sectional study highlight the potential for genetic nurture to bias results from epidemiologic and genetic studies on depression or neuroticism and, with further replication and larger samples, identify potential avenues for future prevention and intervention efforts.

Reciprocal causation mixture model for robust Mendelian randomization analysis using genome-scale summary data.

Mendelian randomization using GWAS summary statistics has become a popular method to infer causal relationships across complex diseases. However, the widespread pleiotropy observed in GWAS has made the selection of valid instrumental variables problematic, leading to possible violations of Mendelian randomization assumptions and thus potentially invalid inferences concerning causation. Furthermore, current MR methods can examine causation in only one direction, so that two separate analyses are required for bi-directional analysis. In this study, we propose a ststistical framework, MRCI (Mixture model Reciprocal Causation Inference), to estimate reciprocal causation between two phenotypes simultaneously using the genome-scale summary statistics of the two phenotypes and reference linkage disequilibrium information. Simulation studies, including strong correlated pleiotropy, showed that MRCI obtained nearly unbiased estimates of causation in both directions, and correct Type I error rates under the null hypothesis. In applications to real GWAS data, MRCI detected significant bi-directional and uni-directional causal influences between common diseases and putative risk factors.

Extended gene set analysis of human neuro-psychiatric traits shows enrichment in brain-expressed human accelerated regions across development.

Human neuropsychiatric disorders are associated with genetic and environmental factors affecting the brain, which has been subjected to strong evolutionary pressures resulting in an enlarged cerebral cortex and improved cognitive performance. Thus, genes involved in human brain evolution may also play a role in neuropsychiatric disorders. We test whether genes associated with 7 neuropsychiatric phenotypes are enriched in genomic regions that have experienced rapid changes in human evolution (HARs) and importantly, whether HAR status interacts with developmental brain expression to predict associated genes. We used the most recent publicly available GWAS and gene expression data to test for enrichment of HARs, brain expression, and their interaction. These revealed significant interactions between HAR status and whole-brain expression across developmental stages, indicating that the relationship between brain expression and association with schizophrenia and intelligence is stronger among HAR than non-HAR genes. Follow-up regional analyses indicated that predicted HAR-expression interaction effects may vary substantially across regions and developmental stages. Although depression indicated significant enrichment of HAR genes, little support was found for HAR enrichment among bipolar, autism, ADHD, or Alzheimer's associated genes. Our results indicate that intelligence, schizophrenia, and depression-associated genes are enriched for those involved in the evolution of the human brain. These findings highlight promising candidates for follow-up study and considerations for novel drug development, but also caution careful assessment of the translational ability of animal models for studying neuropsychiatric traits in the context of HARs, and the importance of using humanized animal models or human-derived tissues when researching these traits.

Improved nonparametric penalized maximum likelihood estimation for arbitrarily censored survival data.

Nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation encompasses a group of classic methods to estimate distribution-associated functions from potentially censored and truncated data, with extensive applications in survival analysis. These methods, including the Kaplan-Meier estimator and Turnbull's method, often result in overfitting, especially when the sample size is small. We propose an improvement to these methods by applying kernel smoothing to their raw estimates, based on a BIC-type loss function that balances the trade-off between optimizing model fit and controlling model complexity. In the context of a longitudinal study with repeated observations, we detail our proposed smoothing procedure and optimization algorithm. With extensive simulation studies over multiple realistic scenarios, we demonstrate that our smoothing-based procedure provides better overall accuracy in both survival function estimation and individual-level time-to-event prediction (imputation) by reducing overfitting. Our smoothing procedure decreases the bias (discrepancy between the estimated and true simulated survival function) using interval-censored data by up to 48% compared to the raw un-smoothed estimate, with similar improvements of up to 34% and 23% in within-sample and out-of-sample prediction, respectively. Our smoothing algorithm also demonstrates significant overall improvement across all three metrics when compared to a popular semiparametric B-splines estimation method. Finally, we apply our method to real data on censored breast cancer diagnosis, which similarly shows improvement when compared to empirical survival estimates from uncensored data. We provide an R package, SISE, for implementing our penalized likelihood method.

Integrative omics of schizophrenia: from genetic determinants to clinical classification and risk prediction.

Schizophrenia (SCZ) is a debilitating neuropsychiatric disorder with high heritability and complex inheritance. In the past decade, successful identification of numerous susceptibility loci has provided useful insights into the molecular etiology of SCZ. However, applications of these findings to clinical classification and diagnosis, risk prediction, or intervention for SCZ have been limited, and elucidating the underlying genomic and molecular mechanisms of SCZ is still challenging. More recently, multiple Omics technologies - genomics, transcriptomics, epigenomics, proteomics, metabolomics, connectomics, and gut microbiomics - have all been applied to examine different aspects of SCZ pathogenesis. Integration of multi-Omics data has thus emerged as an approach to provide a more comprehensive view of biological complexity, which is vital to enable translation into assessments and interventions of clinical benefit to individuals with SCZ. In this review, we provide a broad survey of the single-omics studies of SCZ, summarize the advantages and challenges of different Omics technologies, and then focus on studies in which multiple omics data are integrated to unravel the complex pathophysiology of SCZ. We believe that integration of multi-Omics technologies would provide a roadmap to create a more comprehensive picture of interactions involved in the complex pathogenesis of SCZ, constitute a rich resource for elucidating the potential molecular mechanisms of the illness, and eventually improve clinical assessments and interventions of SCZ to address clinical translational questions from bench to bedside.

Third-generation genome sequencing implicates medium-sized structural variants in chronic schizophrenia.

Background: Schizophrenia (SCZ) is a heterogeneous psychiatric disorder, with significant contribution from genetic factors particularly for chronic cases with negative symptoms and cognitive deficits. To date, Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS) and exome sequencing have associated SCZ with a number of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and copy number variants (CNVs), but there is still missing heritability. Medium-sized structural variants (SVs) are difficult to detect using SNP arrays or second generation sequencing, and may account for part of the missing heritability of SCZ. Aims and objectives: To identify SVs associated with severe chronic SCZ across the whole genome. Study design: 10 multiplex families with probands suffering from chronic SCZ with negative symptoms and cognitive deficits were recruited, with all their affected members demonstrating uni-lineal inheritance. Control subjects comprised one affected member from the affected lineage, and unaffected members from each paternal and maternal lineage. Methods: Third generation sequencing was applied to peripheral blood samples from 10 probands and 5 unaffected controls. Bioinformatic tools were used to identify SVs from the long sequencing reads, with confirmation of findings in probands by short-read Illumina sequencing, Sanger sequencing and visual manual validation with Integrated Genome Browser. Results: In the 10 probands, we identified and validated 88 SVs (mostly in introns and medium-sized), within 79 genes, which were absent in the 5 unaffected control subjects. These 79 genes were enriched in 20 biological pathways which were related to brain development, neuronal migration, neurogenesis, neuronal/synaptic function, learning/memory, and hearing. These identified SVs also showed evidence for enrichment of genes that are highly expressed in the adolescent striatum. Conclusion: A substantial part of the missing heritability in SCZ may be explained by medium-sized SVs detectable only by third generation sequencing. We have identified a number of such SVs potentially conferring risk for SCZ, which implicate multiple brain-related genes and pathways. In addition to previously-identified pathways involved in SCZ such as neurodevelopment and neuronal/synaptic functioning, we also found novel evidence for enrichment in hearing-related pathways and genes expressed in the adolescent striatum.

Modeling Parent-Specific Genetic Nurture in Families with Missing Parental Genotypes: Application to Birthweight and BMI.

Disaggregation and estimation of genetic effects from offspring and parents has long been of interest to statistical geneticists. Recently, technical and methodological advances have made the genome-wide and loci-specific estimation of direct offspring and parental genetic nurture effects more possible. However, unbiased estimation using these methods requires datasets where both parents and at least one child have been genotyped, which are relatively scarce. Our group has recently developed a method and accompanying software (IMPISH; Hwang et al. in PLoS Genet 16:e1009154, 2020) which is able to impute missing parental genotypes from observed data on sibships and estimate their effects on an offspring phenotype conditional on the effects of genetic transmission. However, this method is unable to disentangle maternal and paternal effects, which may differ in magnitude and direction. Here, we introduce an extension to the original IMPISH routine which takes advantage of all available nuclear families to impute parent-specific missing genotypes and obtain asymptotically unbiased estimates of genetic effects on offspring phenotypes. We apply this this method to data from related individuals in the UK Biobank, showing concordance with previous estimates of maternal genetic effects on offspring birthweight. We also conduct the first GWAS jointly estimating offspring-, maternal-, and paternal-specific genetic effects on body-mass index.

Innocuous pressure sensation requires A-type afferents but not functional ΡΙΕΖΟ2 channels in humans.

The sensation of pressure allows us to feel sustained compression and body strain. While our understanding of cutaneous touch has grown significantly in recent years, how deep tissue sensations are detected remains less clear. Here, we use quantitative sensory evaluations of patients with rare sensory disorders, as well as nerve blocks in typical individuals, to probe the neural and genetic mechanisms for detecting non-painful pressure. We show that the ability to perceive innocuous pressures is lost when myelinated fiber function is experimentally blocked in healthy volunteers and that two patients lacking Aß fibers are strikingly unable to feel innocuous pressures at all. We find that seven individuals with inherited mutations in the mechanoreceptor PIEZO2 gene, who have major deficits in touch and proprioception, are nearly as good at sensing pressure as healthy control subjects. Together, these data support a role for Aß afferents in pressure sensation and suggest the existence of an unknown molecular pathway for its detection.

Pleasant Deep Pressure: Expanding the Social Touch Hypothesis.

Neuroscientific research on pleasant touch has focused on the C-tactile pathway for gentle stroking and has successfully explained how these sensory fibers transmit information about affective social touch to the brain and induce sensations of pleasantness. The C-tactile social/affective touch hypothesis even proposes that C-tactile fibers form a privileged pathway underlying social touch. However, deep pressure is a type of touch commonly considered pleasant and calming, occurring in hugs, cuddling, and massage. In this paper we introduce a paradigm for studying pleasant deep pressure and propose that it constitutes another important form of social touch. We describe development of the oscillating compression sleeve (OCS) as one approach to administering deep pressure and demonstrate that this touch is perceived as pleasant and calming. Further, we show that deep pressure can be imaged with functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) using the air-pressure-driven OCS and that deep pressure activates brain regions highly similar to those that respond to C-tactile stroking, as well as regions not activated by stroking. We propose that deep pressure constitutes another social touch pathway of evolutionary importance signaling the close proximity of conspecifics.

Genome-wide DNA methylation analysis of peripheral blood cells derived from patients with first-episode schizophrenia in the Chinese Han population.

Schizophrenia is a severe neuropsychiatric disorder with core features including hallucinations, delusions, and cognition deficits. Accumulating evidence has implicated abnormal DNA methylation in the development of schizophrenia. However, the mechanisms by which DNA methylation changes alter the risk for schizophrenia remain largely unknown. We recently carried out a DNA methylome study of peripheral blood samples from 469 first-episode patients with schizophrenia and 476 age- and gender-matched healthy controls of Han Chinese origin. Genomic DNA methylation patterns were quantified using an Illumina Infinium Human MethylationEPIC BeadChip. We identified multiple differentially methylated positions (DMPs) and regions between patients and controls. The most significant DMPs were annotated to genes C17orf53, THAP1 and KCNQ4 (KV7.4), with Bonferroni-adjusted P values of [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], and [Formula: see text], respectively. In particular, KCNQ4 encodes a voltage-gated potassium channel of the KV7 family, which is linked to neuronal excitability. The genes associated with top-ranked DMPs also included many genes involved in nervous system development, such as LIMK2 and TMOD2. Gene ontology analysis of the differentially methylated genes further identified strong enrichment of neuronal networks, including neuron projection extension, axonogenesis and neuron apoptotic process. Finally, we provided evidence that schizophrenia-associated epigenetic alterations co-localize with genetic susceptibility loci. By focusing on first-episode schizophrenia patients, our investigation lends particularly strong support for an important role of DNA methylation in schizophrenia pathogenesis unconfounded by the effects of long-term antipsychotic medication or disease progression. The observed DNA methylation aberrations in schizophrenia patients could potentially provide a valuable resource for identifying diagnostic biomarkers and developing novel therapeutic targets to benefit schizophrenia patients.

Estimating indirect parental genetic effects on offspring phenotypes using virtual parental genotypes derived from sibling and half sibling pairs.

Indirect parental genetic effects may be defined as the influence of parental genotypes on offspring phenotypes over and above that which results from the transmission of genes from parents to their children. However, given the relative paucity of large-scale family-based cohorts around the world, it is difficult to demonstrate parental genetic effects on human traits, particularly at individual loci. In this manuscript, we illustrate how parental genetic effects on offspring phenotypes, including late onset conditions, can be estimated at individual loci in principle using large-scale genome-wide association study (GWAS) data, even in the absence of parental genotypes. Our strategy involves creating "virtual" mothers and fathers by estimating the genotypic dosages of parental genotypes using physically genotyped data from relative pairs. We then utilize the expected dosages of the parents, and the actual genotypes of the offspring relative pairs, to perform conditional genetic association analyses to obtain asymptotically unbiased estimates of maternal, paternal and offspring genetic effects. We apply our approach to 19066 sibling pairs from the UK Biobank and show that a polygenic score consisting of imputed parental educational attainment SNP dosages is strongly related to offspring educational attainment even after correcting for offspring genotype at the same loci. We develop a freely available web application that quantifies the power of our approach using closed form asymptotic solutions. We implement our methods in a user-friendly software package IMPISH (IMputing Parental genotypes In Siblings and Half Siblings) which allows users to quickly and efficiently impute parental genotypes across the genome in large genome-wide datasets, and then use these estimated dosages in downstream linear mixed model association analyses. We conclude that imputing parental genotypes from relative pairs may provide a useful adjunct to existing large-scale genetic studies of parents and their offspring.

Systemic neuro-dysregulation in depression: Evidence from genome-wide association.

Depression is the world's leading cause of disability. Greater understanding of the neurobiological basis of depression is necessary for developing novel treatments with improved efficacy and acceptance. Recently, major advances have been made in the search for genetic variants associated with depression which may help to elucidate etiological mechanisms. The present review has two major objectives. First, we offer a brief review of two major biological systems with strong evidence for involvement in depression pathology: neurotransmitter systems and the stress response. Secondly, we provide a synthesis of the functions of the 269 genes implicated by the most recent genome-wide meta-analysis, supporting the importance of these systems in depression and providing insights into other possible mechanisms involving neurodevelopment, neurogenesis, and neurodegeneration. Our goal is to undertake a broad, preliminary stock-taking of the most recent hypothesis-free findings and examine the weight of the evidence supporting these existing theories and highlighting novel directions. This qualitative review and accompanying gene function table provides a valuable resource and guide for basic and translational researchers, with suggestions for future mechanistic research, leveraging genetics to prioritize studies on the neurobiological processes involved in depression etiology and treatment.