The overarching goal of this study is the development of a framework to identify causal regulatory mutations in patients with serious neuropsychiatric presentations through the paired analyses of whole genome sequence and high resolution RNA sequence data from both accessible primary cells (PBMC and buccal cells) and reprogrammed neuronal cells from the same patients. The latter constitutes a particularly exciting opportunity as it will allow us to assay gene expression during different developmental stages of previously inaccessible cell types of much greater relevance to patient phenotype than the circulating cells DNA studies are customarily performed on. Specifically, we will interpret the effects of the regulatory variants in different developmental stages of the reprogrammed neuronal and other cells of interest with a comparison to the PBMC and buccal cells helping to interpret the specificity or generality of the relevant effects in different tissues. These analyses will focus not only on mapping cis- and trans-acting eQTLs, but will also deploy new variant prioritization schemes that integrate knowledge of regulatory regions of the genome through ENCODE and related efforts as well as population genetic data. While an explicit aim of the work is to identify regulatory variants influencing risk of schizophrenia and autism, we emphasize that this work has primarily the broader goal of the development of appropriate frameworks for the eventual identification of such mutations, which inevitably will require substantially larger sample sizes that currently feasible to facilitate systematic discovery.

Public Health Relevance

OF PROJECT TO PUBLIC HEALTH This project will establish a paradigm by which rare, non-coding DNA variation can begin to be robustly evaluated for a role in severe neurodevelopmental and Mendelian disease. This in turn may lead to the development of specific tests to improve the diagnosis of such disorders and may point to novel therapeutic targets to improve treatment options.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
Type
Research Project--Cooperative Agreements (U01)
Project #
3U01MH105575-04S1
Application #
9637140
Study Section
Program Officer
Addington, Anjene M
Project Start
2014-09-18
Project End
2019-05-31
Budget Start
2018-06-01
Budget End
2019-05-31
Support Year
4
Fiscal Year
2018
Total Cost
Indirect Cost
Name
University of California San Francisco
Department
Psychiatry
Type
Schools of Medicine
DUNS #
094878337
City
San Francisco
State
CA
Country
United States
Zip Code
94118
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Willsey, A Jeremy; Morris, Montana T; Wang, Sheng et al. (2018) The Psychiatric Cell Map Initiative: A Convergent Systems Biological Approach to Illuminating Key Molecular Pathways in Neuropsychiatric Disorders. Cell 174:505-520
Sanders, Stephan J; Neale, Benjamin M; Huang, Hailiang et al. (2017) Whole genome sequencing in psychiatric disorders: the WGSPD consortium. Nat Neurosci 20:1661-1668