Center for Applied Genomics, The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
Neuropsychiatric Signaling Program, Department of Psychiatry, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
Transl Psychiatry. 2017 Aug 15;7(8):e1203. doi: 10.1038/tp.2017.154.
The amygdala brain region has been implicated in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia through emotion processing. However, transcriptome messages in the amygdala of schizophrenia patients have not been well studied. We used RNA sequencing to investigate gene-expression profiling in the amygdala tissues, and identified 569 upregulated and 192 downregulated genes from 22 schizophrenia patients and 24 non-psychiatric controls. Gene functional enrichment analysis demonstrated that the downregulated genes were enriched in pathways such as 'synaptic transmission' and 'behavior', whereas the upregulated genes were significantly over-represented in gene ontology pathways such as 'immune response' and 'blood vessel development'. Co-expression-based gene network analysis identified seven modules including four modules significantly associated with 'synaptic transmission', 'blood vessel development' or 'immune responses'. Taken together, our study provides novel insights into the molecular mechanism of schizophrenia, suggesting that precision-tailored therapeutic approaches aimed at normalizing the expression/function of specific gene networks could be a promising option in schizophrenia.
杏仁核脑区通过情绪处理被牵涉到精神分裂症的病理生理学中。然而，精神分裂症患者杏仁核中的转录组信息尚未得到很好的研究。我们使用 RNA 测序来研究杏仁核组织中的基因表达谱，从 22 名精神分裂症患者和 24 名非精神疾病对照中鉴定出 569 个上调和 192 个下调基因。基因功能富集分析表明，下调基因富集在“突触传递”和“行为”等途径中，而上调基因在“免疫反应”和“血管发育”等基因本体途径中显著过表达。基于共表达的基因网络分析确定了七个模块，包括四个与“突触传递”、“血管发育”或“免疫反应”显著相关的模块。总之，我们的研究为精神分裂症的分子机制提供了新的见解，表明针对特定基因网络的表达/功能进行精确调整的治疗方法可能是精神分裂症的一个有前途的选择。
