Mental disease susceptibility genes are still unclear? New research finds evidence chain

　　Medicine Network January 16th , serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia , bipolar disorder and depression pose a great threat to human mental health In a recent paper published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, the Kunming Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said they have made important progress in conducting systematic genetic and functional genomics research to explore functional susceptibility sites and susceptibility genes that play a key role in the occurrence of mental illness a series of studies in recent years have shown that genetic factors play a key role in the occurrence of heavy mental However, although a large number of genome-wide association analyses identified a number of sites significantly associated with severe mental illness, with functional effects, the genetic sites and susceptibility genes that play a role in disease-related physiological pathological changes remain unclear At the same time, cumulative evidence suggests that different mental disorders may have the same genetic susceptibility factors in some parts of the genome, and that these genetic susceptibility factors are likely to be associated with preformations such as cognitive impairment common to the disease , Researcher Li Ming, researcher at Kunming Animal Research Institute, and others analyzed large-scale genomic data and human brain transcription data for mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression, focusing on the chromosome-related regions previously reported in genome-wide association analysis that are significantly associated with these diseases, and identifying a large number of independent genetic variations in the region that significantly increase the risk of multiple mental illnesses they also found that the risk alleles of these mutations were significantly associated with an increase in the expression of neK4, GNL3 genes in the brain, and a decrease in the expression of the RBRM1 gene It is worth noting that the above variants of the mental health risk alleles also correspond to poorer cognitive levels and lower brain activity levels More importantly, when people expressed the NEK4, GNL3 gene, or knocked down the PBRM1 gene, these neurons showed a significant reduction in the density of mushroom-like dene Given that mushroom-like dendritic stoma has been shown to play a key role in synaptic transmission and cognitive function, the decrease in density is likely to be a pathological change shared by different mental disorders these studies form a complete chain of evidence, which further confirms the critical role of the above chromosome regions in the occurrence of mental illness and related phenotypes, and provides clues to the specific effects of the disease on the other.