刊登在杂志Molecular Psychiatry上的两篇研究报告,研究者揭示了引发强迫性障碍(OCD)和多动秽语综合征(TS)的基因突变,相关研究由麻省总医院(Massachusetts General Hospital)的研究者承担,研究者进行了全基因组水平的相关联分析(GWAS),揭示了引发这两种疾病的基因突变。
以前研究认为,这两种疾病(OCD和TS)是遗传性的,而且其含有共同的遗传风险因子。但是对于具体致病基因的识别却是一项巨大的工作量。目前研究者进行这项研究来帮助我们理解这两种疾病的潜在遗传构架和风险所在。
一种以强迫观念和压力为特点的焦虑性障碍严重影响着病人的生活质量,OCD就是第四种常见的精神学疾病。而TS疾病是一种慢性混乱病症,主要特点为肌肉抽动和发音痉挛,常常在幼年就开始发病,而且常常伴有OCD疾病样的症状。这两种疾病在受感染的近亲之间出现的风险非常高,但是却有研究表明,在受感染和未感染的个体里,并没有发现特定的基因或者基因组区域和疾病的发病风险相关。
由于很多基因都和OCD、TS的发病情况直接相关,因此研究者进行了GWAS的研究,其中在成百上千位个体中分析了其SNPs(单核苷酸多态性)的突变。OCD基金会,包括9个国家的20个研究小组,对1465个OCD个体、超过5000个对照以及400份OCD患者和其父母的样品(三份样品)进行了480,000个SNPs位点分析。同时TS协会对来自1500个个体以及超过5200个对照的484,000个SNPs位点也进行了相应的分析。
在OCD的研究结果中,研究者发现了相关基因BTBD3,其和TS疾病基因非常相近;发现的基因DLGAP1,在小鼠实验中,如果其被剔除便可以产生类似OCD疾病的症状。在对TS疾病研究过程中,研究者发现了基因COL27A1,其可以在小脑发育阶段进行表达,如果其突变可以帮助调节大脑前脑皮层的基因表达。
Genome-wide association study of Tourette's syndrome
J M Scharf, D Yu, C A Mathews, B M Neale, S E Stewart, J A Fagerness, P Evans, E Gamazon, C K Edlund, S K Service, A Tikhomirov, L Osiecki, C Illmann, A Pluzhnikov, A Konkashbaev, L K Davis, B Han, J Crane, P Moorjani, A T Crenshaw, M A Parkin, V I Reus, T L Lowe, M Rangel-Lugo, S Chouinard, Y Dion, S Girard, D C Cath, J H Smit, R A King, T V Fernandez, J F Leckman, K K Kidd, J R Kidd, A J Pakstis, M W State, L D Herrera, R Romero, E Fournier, P Sandor, C L Barr, N Phan, V Gross-Tsur, F Benarroch, Y Pollak, C L Budman, R D Bruun, G Erenberg, A L Naarden, P C Lee, N Weiss, B Kremeyer, G B Berrío, D D Campbell, J C Cardona Silgado, W C Ochoa, S C Mesa Restrepo, H Muller, A V Valencia Duarte, G J Lyon, M Leppert, J Morgan, R Weiss, M A Grados, K Anderson, S Davarya, H Singer, J Walkup, J Jankovic, J A Tischfield, G A Heiman, D L Gilbert, P J Hoekstra, M M Robertson, R Kurlan, C Liu, J R Gibbs, A Singleton, for the North American Brain Expression Consortium, J Hardy, for the UK Human Brain Expression Database, E Strengman, R A Ophoff, M Wagner, R Moessner, D B Mirel, D Posthuma, C Sabatti, E Eskin, D V Conti, J A Knowles, A Ruiz-Linares, G A Rouleau, S Purcell, P Heutink, B A Oostra, W M McMahon, N B Freimer, N J Cox and D L Pauls
Tourette's syndrome (TS) is a developmental disorder that has one of the highest familial recurrence rates among neuropsychiatric diseases with complex inheritance. However, the identification of definitive TS susceptibility genes remains elusive. Here, we report the first genome-wide association study (GWAS) of TS in 1285 cases and 4964 ancestry-matched controls of European ancestry, including two European-derived population isolates, Ashkenazi Jews from North America and Israel and French Canadians from Quebec, Canada. In a primary meta-analysis of GWAS data from these European ancestry samples, no markers achieved a genome-wide threshold of significance (P<5 × 10−8); the top signal was found in rs7868992 on chromosome 9q32 within COL27A1 (P=1.85 × 10−6). A secondary analysis including an additional 211 cases and 285 controls from two closely related Latin American population isolates from the Central Valley of Costa Rica and Antioquia, Colombia also identified rs7868992 as the top signal (P=3.6 × 10−7 for the combined sample of 1496 cases and 5249 controls following imputation with 1000 Genomes data). This study lays the groundwork for the eventual identification of common TS susceptibility variants in larger cohorts and helps to provide a more complete understanding of the full genetic architecture of this disorder.