Back

High-risk neuropsychiatric copy number variants are associated with convergent transcriptomic changes in human brain cells

Dugan, G.; Akula, N.; Marenco, S.; Auluck, P.; Raznahan, A.; Liu, S.; DeCasien, A. R.; Xu, Q.; Feng, N.; Kolachana, B.; Jiang, X.; Gregory, M.; Berman, K.; Hoffman, G.; Roussos, P.; Schulmann, A.; McMahon, F.

2024-09-22 genetics
10.1101/2024.09.19.613680 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Large, recurrent copy number variants (CNVs) are among the strongest risk factors for neuropsychiatric conditions, contributing to multiple phenotypes with overlapping psychiatric and cognitive symptoms. However, the molecular basis of this convergent risk remains unknown. We evaluated the human brain transcriptome in carriers of nine high-risk neuropsychiatric CNVs and matched non-carriers using single nucleus RNA-sequencing. Brain tissue from carriers displayed widespread disruptions of gene expression, with thousands of differentially expressed genes, mostly located outside of the respective CNV regions. There were greater changes in deletions compared to reciprocal duplications. Functional enrichment analysis revealed changes in mitochondrial energy metabolism and synaptic function that converged across CNVs and cell types. For mirror CNVs, the direction of effects was often reversed between deletions and duplications and showed correlation with CNV gene dosage. These findings suggest that a shared pathophysiology underlies risk for convergent brain phenotypes across CNVs and point toward promising therapeutic targets.

Matching journals

The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.