A network view on Schizophrenia related genes

This study is a part of a project investigating the molecular determinants of neurological diseases. To account for the systemic nature of these diseases we proceeded from a well established list of 38 schizophrenia-related genes (Allen et al., 2008; Ross et al., 2006) and investigated their closest network environment. The created networks were compared to recently proposed list of 173 schizophrenia related genes (Sun et al., 2009). 115 genes were predicted as potentially related to schizophrenia and subjected to GSEA. The enriched groups of proteins included neuromodulators, neurotransmitters and lipid transport. Over 100 signaling pathways were found significantly involved, signal transduction emerging as the most highly significant biological process. Next, we analyzed two microarray expression datasets derived from olfactory mucosa biopsies of schizophrenic patients and postmortem brain tissue samples from SMRIDB. The systems biology analysis resulted in a number of other genes predicted to be potentially related to schizophrenia, as well as in additional information of interest for elucidating molecular mechanisms of schizophrenia.