Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Letter
  • Published:

Genome-wide association study identifies a susceptibility locus for schizophrenia in Han Chinese at 11p11.2

Abstract

To identify susceptibility loci for schizophrenia, we performed a two-stage genome-wide association study (GWAS) of schizophrenia in the Han Chinese population (GWAS: 746 individuals with schizophrenia and 1,599 healthy controls; validation: 4,027 individuals with schizophrenia and 5,603 healthy controls). We identified two susceptibility loci for schizophrenia at 6p21-p22.1 (rs1233710 in an intron of ZKSCAN4, Pcombined = 4.76 × 10−11, odds ratio (OR) = 0.79; rs1635 in an exon of NKAPL, Pcombined = 6.91 × 10−12, OR = 0.78; rs2142731 in an intron of PGBD1, Pcombined = 5.14 × 10−10, OR = 0.79) and 11p11.2 (rs11038167 near the 5′ UTR of TSPAN18, Pcombined = 1.09 × 10−11, OR = 1.29; rs11038172, Pcombined = 7.21 × 10−10, OR = 1.25; rs835784, Pcombined = 2.73 × 10−11, OR = 1.27). These results add to previous evidence of susceptibility loci for schizophrenia at 6p21-p22.1 in the Han Chinese population. We found that NKAPL and ZKSCAN4 were expressed in postnatal day 0 (P0) mouse brain. These findings may lead to new insights into the pathogenesis of schizophrenia.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Figure 1: Regional plots of the two loci associated with schizophrenia at 6p21-p22.1 and 11p11.2.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Lichtenstein, P. et al. Common genetic determinants of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in Swedish families: a population-based study. Lancet 373, 234–239 (2009).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  2. Thaker, G.K. & Carpenter, W. Advances in schizophrenia. Nat. Med. 7, 667–671 (2001).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  3. Harrison, P.J. & Owen, M.J. Genes for schizophrenia? Recent findings and their pathophysiological implications. Lancet 361, 417–419 (2003).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  4. Allen, N.C. et al. Systematic meta-analyses and field synopsis of genetic association studies in schizophrenia: the SzGene database. Nat. Genet. 40, 827–834 (2008).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  5. O'Donovan, M.C. et al. Identification of loci associated with schizophrenia by genome-wide association and follow-up. Nat. Genet. 40, 1053–1055 (2008).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  6. International Schizophrenia Consortium et al. Common polygenic variation contributes to risk of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Nature 460, 748–752 (2009).

  7. Stefansson, H. et al. Common variants conferring risk of schizophrenia. Nature 460, 744–747 (2009).

    CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  8. Shi, J. et al. Common variants on chromosome 6p22.1 are associated with schizophrenia. Nature 460, 753–757 (2009).

    CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  9. Price, A.L. et al. Principal components analysis corrects for stratification in genome-wide association studies. Nat. Genet. 38, 904–909 (2006).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  10. Purcell, S. et al. PLINK: a tool set for whole-genome association and population-based linkage analyses. Am. J. Hum. Genet. 81, 559–575 (2007).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  11. Pruim, R.J. et al. LocusZoom: regional visualization of genome-wide association scan results. Bioinformatics 26, 2336–2337 (2010).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  12. Higgins, J.P. & Thompson, S.G. Quantifying heterogeneity in a meta-analysis. Stat. Med. 21, 1539–1558 (2002).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  13. Mantel, N. & Haenszel, W. Statistical aspects of the analysis of data from retrospective studies. J. Natl. Cancer Inst. 22, 719–748 (1959).

    CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  14. Gibbs, J.R. et al. Abundant quantitative trait loci exist for DNA methylation and gene expression in human brain. PLoS Genet. 6, e1000952 (2010).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  15. Richards, A.L. et al. Schizophrenia susceptibility alleles are enriched for alleles that affect gene expression in adult human brain. Mol. Psychiatry (in the press).

  16. Pajerowski, A.G. et al. NKAP is a transcriptional repressor of Notch signaling and is required for T cell development. Immunity 30, 696–707 (2009).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  17. Chen, D. et al. Identification of a nuclear protein that promotes NF-κB activation. Biochem. Biophys. Res. Commun. 310, 720–724 (2003).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  18. Li, J. et al. ZNF307, a novel zinc finger gene suppresses p53 and p21 pathway. Biochem. Biophys. Res. Commun. 363, 895–900 (2007).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  19. Bertram, L. & Tanzi, R.E. Genome-wide association studies in Alzheimer's disease. Hum. Mol. Genet. 18, R137–R145 (2009).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  20. Strous, R.D. & Shoenfeld, Y. Schizophrenia, autoimmunity and immune system dysregulation: a comprehensive model updated and revisited. J. Autoimmun. 27, 71–80 (2006).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  21. McGlashan, T.H. & Hoffman, R.E. Schizophrenia as a disorder of developmentally reduced synaptic connectivity. Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 57, 637–648 (2000).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  22. Hemler, M.E. Tetraspanin proteins mediate cellular penetration, invasion, and fusion events and define a novel type of membrane microdomain. Annu. Rev. Cell Dev. Biol. 19, 397–422 (2003).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  23. Berditchevski, F. & Odintsova, E. Tetraspanins as regulators of protein trafficking. Traffic 8, 89–96 (2007).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  24. Sklar, P. et al. Whole-genome association study of bipolar disorder. Mol. Psychiatry 13, 558–569 (2008).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  25. Chen, J. et al. Genetic structure of the Han Chinese population revealed by genome-wide SNP variation. Am. J. Hum. Genet. 85, 775–785 (2009).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  26. Xu, S. et al. Genomic dissection of population substructure of Han Chinese and its implication in association studies. Am. J. Hum. Genet. 85, 762–774 (2009).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  27. Zhang, F.R. et al. Genomewide association study of leprosy. N. Engl. J. Med. 361, 2609–2618 (2009).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  28. Higgins, J.P. & Thompson, S.G. Quantifying heterogeneity in a meta-analysis. Stat. Med. 21, 1539–1558 (2002).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  29. Higgins, J.P. et al. Measuring inconsistency in meta-analyses. Br. Med. J. 327, 557–560 (2003).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. DerSimonian, R. & Laird, N. Meta-analysis in clinical trials. Control. Clin. Trials 7, 177–188 (1986).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

We thank J. Liu from the Human Genetics, Genome Institute of Singapore for his suggestions for revision of the manuscript. We acknowledge with appreciation all the individuals with schizophrenia and healthy control subjects whose contributions made this work possible. This work was supported by research grants from the National High-Tech Research and Development Program of China (2009AA022702), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (30530290, 30870896, 81071087 and 81071088), the National Basic Research Program of China (2007CB512301, 2011CB707805) and the International Science & Technology Cooperation Program of China (2010DFB30820).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

D.Z., W.H., X.-J.Z., G.-P.Z. and T.L. designed the study. D.Z. and X.-J.Z. revised the manuscript. D.Z. and W.-H.Y. obtained financial support. W.-H.Y., L.-D.S. and L.-F.W. prepared the manuscript. H.-F.W., W.-H.Y. and L.-D.S. supervised the experiments and data analysis. H.-X.Z., W.-Q.L., Y.-L.Z., C.-C.M., B.D., Y.-Q.R., Y.-F.Y., X.-F.H., Y.W., W.D., L.-W.T., Y.-L.T., Q.C., G.-M.X., G.-G.Y., H.Y., Y.-Y.R., T.-L.L., X.H., X.-H.M., Y.W., L.-W.C., C.J., H.-Y.Z., J.Y., W.-F.M., X.-Y.Y., W.-B.M., Q.L., L.K., W.S., C.-Y.P., M.S., F.-D.Y., C.-Y.W., J.-L.Y., K.-Q.L., X.M., L.-J.L., X.Y. and L.-X.L. conducted sample selection and data management, undertook recruitment, collected phenotype data, undertook related data handling and calculation, managed recruitment and obtained biological samples. W.-H.Y., L.-F.W., X.B.Z. and Q.-Z.L. undertook data processing, statistical analysis and bioinformatics investigations. F.-L.T., Z.-H.L., Y.Z. and X.H. performed in situ hybridization and RNAi experiments. All authors critically reviewed the manuscript and approved the final version.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Wei Huang or Dai Zhang.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Text and Figures

Supplementary Tables 1–6, Supplementary Figures 1–6 and Supplementary Note (PDF 2238 kb)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Yue, WH., Wang, HF., Sun, LD. et al. Genome-wide association study identifies a susceptibility locus for schizophrenia in Han Chinese at 11p11.2. Nat Genet 43, 1228–1231 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.979

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.979

This article is cited by

Search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing