Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 0SZ, United Kingdom;
Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 0SZ, United Kingdom.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2019 May 7;116(19):9604-9609. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1820754116. Epub 2019 Apr 19.
Schizophrenia has been conceived as a disorder of brain connectivity, but it is unclear how this network phenotype is related to the underlying genetics. We used morphometric similarity analysis of MRI data as a marker of interareal cortical connectivity in three prior case-control studies of psychosis: in total, = 185 cases and = 227 controls. Psychosis was associated with globally reduced morphometric similarity in all three studies. There was also a replicable pattern of case-control differences in regional morphometric similarity, which was significantly reduced in patients in frontal and temporal cortical areas but increased in parietal cortex. Using prior brain-wide gene expression data, we found that the cortical map of case-control differences in morphometric similarity was spatially correlated with cortical expression of a weighted combination of genes enriched for neurobiologically relevant ontology terms and pathways. In addition, genes that were normally overexpressed in cortical areas with reduced morphometric similarity were significantly up-regulated in three prior post mortem studies of schizophrenia. We propose that this combined analysis of neuroimaging and transcriptional data provides insight into how previously implicated genes and proteins as well as a number of unreported genes in their topological vicinity on the protein interaction network may drive structural brain network changes mediating the genetic risk of schizophrenia.
精神分裂症被认为是一种大脑连接障碍,但目前尚不清楚这种网络表型与潜在的遗传学有何关系。我们使用 MRI 数据的形态相似性分析作为精神分裂症三个先前病例对照研究中皮质区连接的标记物:总共包括 = 185 例病例和 = 227 例对照。所有三项研究均表明精神分裂症与整体形态相似性降低有关。在病例对照之间的区域形态相似性上也存在可重复的差异模式,患者的额皮质和颞皮质区域的形态相似性显著降低,而顶皮质区域的形态相似性增加。利用先前的全脑基因表达数据,我们发现形态相似性病例对照差异的皮质图谱与基于神经生物学相关本体论术语和途径的基因加权组合的皮质表达具有空间相关性。此外,在三个先前的精神分裂症死后研究中,形态相似性降低的皮质区域中通常过表达的基因显著上调。我们提出,这种神经影像学和转录组数据的综合分析为先前涉及的基因和蛋白质以及蛋白质相互作用网络中拓扑附近的许多未报告基因如何驱动介导精神分裂症遗传风险的结构性大脑网络变化提供了深入了解。