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Candidate gene methylation analysis in schizophrenia: a human postmortem brain study
Author(s) -
Buckland michael,
Sarris Maria,
Suter Catherine,
Martin David I.K.
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.22.2_supplement.587
Subject(s) - epigenetics , candidate gene , schizophrenia (object oriented programming) , dna methylation , genetics , methylation , gene , biology , population , gene expression , psychology , psychiatry , medicine , environmental health
Schizophrenia is a common mental disorder characterized by impairments in the perception or expression of reality and by significant social or occupational dysfunction. It is common across many societies, with an incidence approaching 1% of the population. Many candidate schizophrenia genes have been identified by genetic linkage and association studies however no disease‐causing mutations have been identified. We hypothesized that aberrant epigenetic silencing of these candidate genes may occur in schizophrenia. We tested for promoter methylation of 12 genes that have been implicated in schizophrenia in affected (n=85) and normal brains (n=14). We did not find large differences in the methylation patterns of the genes tested between these two groups. However we did find that many of these genes did have some detectable methylation in many brains. The significance of this low level methylation in human brain is currently unknown.