A comprehensive family-based replication study of schizophrenia genes.

Importance: Schizophrenia (SCZ) is a devastating psychiatric condition. Identifying the specific genetic variants and pathways that increase susceptibility to SCZ is critical to improve disease understanding and address the urgent need for new drug targets.

Objective: To identify SCZ susceptibility genes.

Estimation of CpG coverage in whole methylome next-generation sequencing studies.

Background: Methylation studies are a promising complement to genetic studies of DNA sequence. However, detailed prior biological knowledge is typically lacking, so methylome-wide association studies (MWAS) will be critical to detect disease relevant sites. A cost-effective approach involves the next-generation sequencing (NGS) of single-end libraries created from samples that are enriched for methylated DNA fragments.

MBD-seq as a cost-effective approach for methylome-wide association studies: demonstration in 1500 case--control samples.

Aim: We studied the use of methyl-CpG binding domain (MBD) protein-enriched genome sequencing (MBD-seq) as a cost-effective screening tool for methylome-wide association studies (MWAS).

Materials & Methods: Because MBD-seq has not yet been applied on a large scale, we first developed and tested a pipeline for data processing using 1500 schizophrenia cases and controls plus 75 technical replicates with an average of 68 million reads per sample. This involved the use of technical replicates to optimize quality control for multi- and duplicate-reads, an in silico experiment to identify CpGs in loci with alignment problems, CpG coverage calculations based on multiparametric estimates of the fragment size distribution, a two-stage adaptive algorithm to combine data from correlated adjacent CpG sites, principal component analyses to control for confounders and new software tailored to handle the large data set.

Genome-wide association study of patient-rated and clinician-rated global impression of severity during antipsychotic treatment.

Objective: To examine the unique and congruent findings between multiple raters in a genome-wide association study (GWAS) in the context of understanding individual differences in treatment response during antipsychotic therapy for schizophrenia.

Materials And Methods: We performed GWAS to search for genetic variation affecting treatment response. The analysis sample included 738 patients with schizophrenia, successfully genotyped for ∼492k single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from the Clinical Antipsychotic Trial of Intervention Effectiveness.

Genome-wide pharmacogenomic study of citalopram-induced side effects in STAR*D.

Affecting about 1 in 12 Americans annually, depression is a leading cause of the global disease burden. While a range of effective antidepressants are now available, failure and relapse rates remain substantial, with intolerable side effect burden the most commonly cited reason for discontinuation. Thus, understanding individual differences in susceptibility to antidepressant therapy side effects will be essential to optimize depression treatment.