UMMS Affiliation
Department of Quantitative Health Sciences; Department of Psychiatry
Publication Date
11-17-2015
Document Type
Article
Disciplines
Bioinformatics | Computational Biology | Computational Neuroscience | Genetics | Medical Genetics | Medical Molecular Biology | Mental Disorders | Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience | Molecular Biology | Molecular Genetics | Psychiatry | Translational Medical Research
Abstract
A strong motivation for undertaking psychiatric gene discovery studies is to provide novel insights into unknown biology. Although attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is highly heritable, and large, rare copy number variants (CNVs) contribute to risk, little is known about its pathogenesis and it remains commonly misunderstood. We assembled and pooled five ADHD and control CNV data sets from the United Kingdom, Ireland, United States of America, Northern Europe and Canada. Our aim was to test for enrichment of neurodevelopmental gene sets, implicated by recent exome-sequencing studies of (a) schizophrenia and (b) autism as a means of testing the hypothesis that common pathogenic mechanisms underlie ADHD and these other neurodevelopmental disorders. We also undertook hypothesis-free testing of all biological pathways. We observed significant enrichment of individual genes previously found to harbour schizophrenia de novo non-synonymous single-nucleotide variants (SNVs; P=5.4 x 10-4) and targets of the Fragile X mental retardation protein (P=0.0018). No enrichment was observed for activity-regulated cytoskeleton-associated protein (P=0.23) or N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (P=0.74) post-synaptic signalling gene sets previously implicated in schizophrenia. Enrichment of ADHD CNV hits for genes impacted by autism de novo SNVs (P=0.019 for non-synonymous SNV genes) did not survive Bonferroni correction. Hypothesis-free testing yielded several highly significantly enriched biological pathways, including ion channel pathways. Enrichment findings were robust to multiple testing corrections and to sensitivity analyses that excluded the most significant sample. The findings reveal that CNVs in ADHD converge on biologically meaningful gene clusters, including ones now established as conferring risk of other neurodevelopmental disorders.
Keywords
UMCCTS funding
Rights and Permissions
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DOI of Published Version
10.1038/mp.2015.163
Source
Mol Psychiatry. 2015 Nov 17. doi: 10.1038/mp.2015.163. Link to article on publisher's site
Journal/Book/Conference Title
Molecular psychiatry
Related Resources
PubMed ID
26573769
Repository Citation
Thapar, Anita; Martin, J.; Mick, Eric; Arias Vasquez, A.; Langley, Kate; Scherer, Stephen W.; Schachar, Russell; Crosbie, Jennifer; Williams, N.; Franke, Barbara; Elia, J.; Glessner, J.; Hakonarson, H.; Owen, M. J.; Faraone, S. V.; O'Donovan, Michael C.; and Holmans, Peter, "Psychiatric gene discoveries shape evidence on ADHD's biology" (2015). UMass Center for Clinical and Translational Science Supported Publications. 66.
https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/umccts_pubs/66
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Included in
Bioinformatics Commons, Computational Biology Commons, Computational Neuroscience Commons, Genetics Commons, Medical Genetics Commons, Medical Molecular Biology Commons, Mental Disorders Commons, Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience Commons, Molecular Biology Commons, Molecular Genetics Commons, Psychiatry Commons, Translational Medical Research Commons