Abstract
Genome-wide analysis (GWA) is an effective strategy to discover extreme effects surpassing genome-wide significant levels in studying complex disorders; however, when sample size is limited, the true effects may fail to achieve genome-wide significance. In such case, there may be authentic results among the pools of nominal candidates, and an alternative approach is to consider nominal candidates but are replicable across different samples. Here, we found that mRNA expression of the choline dehydrogenase gene (CHDH) was uniformly upregulated in the brains of bipolar disorder (BPD) patients compared with healthy controls across different studies. Follow-up genetic analyses of CHDH variants in multiple independent clinical datasets (including 11,564 cases and 17,686 controls) identified a risk SNP rs9836592 showing consistent associations with BPD (P meta = 5.72 × 10−4), and the risk allele indicated an increased CHDH expression in multiple neuronal tissues (lowest P = 6.70 × 10−16). These converging results may identify a nominal but true BPD susceptibility gene CHDH. Further exploratory analysis revealed suggestive associations of rs9836592 with childhood intelligence (P = 0.044) and educational attainment (P = 0.0039), a “proxy phenotype” of general cognitive abilities. Intriguingly, the CHDH gene is located at chromosome 3p21.1, a risk region implicated in previous BPD genome-wide association studies (GWAS), but CHDH is lying outside of the core GWAS linkage disequilibrium (LD) region, and our studied SNP rs9836592 is ∼1.2 Mb 3′ downstream of the previous GWAS loci (e.g., rs2251219) with no LD between them; thus, the association observed here is unlikely a reflection of previous GWAS signals. In summary, our results imply that CHDH may play a previously unknown role in the etiology of BPD and also highlight the informative value of integrating gene expression and genetic code in advancing our understanding of its biological basis.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to acknowledge the efforts of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium Bipolar Disorder Working Group for their contributions to this study. We are grateful to Andrew Willden (Kunming Institute of Zoology) for language editing of the manuscript. This work was supported by CAS Pioneer Hundred Talents Program (to M.L.). This work was also supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) through the Integrated Genome Research Network (IG) MooDS (Systematic Investigation of the Molecular Causes of Major Mood Disorders and Schizophrenia; grant 01GS08144 to SC and MMN and grant 01GS08147 to MR), under the auspices of the National Genome Research Network plus (NGFNplus), and through the Integrated Network IntegraMent (Integrated Understanding of Causes and Mechanisms in Mental Disorders), under the auspices of the e:Med Programme (grant 01ZX1314A to SC and MMN and grant 01ZX1314G to MR). MMN is a member of the DFG-funded Excellence-Cluster ImmunoSensation. The Romanian sample recruitment and genotyping was funded by UEFISCDI, Bucharest, Romania, grant no. 89/2012 to M.G.S., and by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), MooDS Project, grant no. 01GS08144 to S.C. and M.M.N. Funding for the Swedish collection was provided by the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, Broad Institute, from a grant from Stanley Medical Research Institute. We also wish to thank the BBMRI.se and KI Biobank at Karolinska Institutet for the professional biobank service.
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Hong Chang, Lingyi Li and Tao Peng contributed equally to this work.
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Chang, H., Li, L., Peng, T. et al. Identification of a Bipolar Disorder Vulnerable Gene CHDH at 3p21.1. Mol Neurobiol 54, 5166–5176 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12035-016-0041-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12035-016-0041-x