A Whole Methylome CpG-SNP Association Study of Psychosis in Blood and Brain Tissue. Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • Mutated CpG sites (CpG-SNPs) are potential hotspots for human diseases because in addition to the sequence variation they may show individual differences in DNA methylation. We performed methylome-wide association studies (MWAS) to test whether methylation differences at those sites were associated with schizophrenia. We assayed all common CpG-SNPs with methyl-CpG binding domain protein-enriched genome sequencing (MBD-seq) using DNA extracted from 1408 blood samples and 66 postmortem brain samples (BA10) of schizophrenia cases and controls. Seven CpG-SNPs passed our FDR threshold of 0.1 in the blood MWAS. Of the CpG-SNPs methylated in brain, 94% were also methylated in blood. This significantly exceeded the 46.2% overlap expected by chance (P-value < 1.010(-8)) and justified replicating findings from blood in brain tissue. CpG-SNP rs3796293 in IL1RAP replicated (P-value = .003) with the same direction of effects. This site was further validated through targeted bisulfite pyrosequencing in 736 independent case-control blood samples (P-value < 9.510(-4)). Our top result in the brain MWAS (P-value = 8.810(-7)) was CpG-SNP rs16872141 located in the potential promoter of ENC1. Overall, our results suggested that CpG-SNP methylation may reflect effects of environmental insults and can provide biomarkers in blood that could potentially improve disease management.

published proceedings

  • Schizophr Bull

altmetric score

  • 1

author list (cited authors)

  • van den Oord, E., Clark, S. L., Xie, L. Y., Shabalin, A. A., Dozmorov, M. G., Kumar, G., ... Aberg, K. A.

citation count

  • 37

complete list of authors

  • van den Oord, Edwin JCG||Clark, Shaunna L||Xie, Lin Ying||Shabalin, Andrey A||Dozmorov, Mikhail G||Kumar, Gaurav||Vladimirov, Vladimir I||Magnusson, Patrik KE||Aberg, Karolina A

publication date

  • July 2016