Abstract
Disturbances in GABAergic system have been observed in schizophrenics.1,2,3 In the present study, population association analysis was performed on 19 SNPs in the α1, β2, γ2, ɛ and π subunit genes of GABAA receptor. Five SNPs in GABRB2, namely B2I7G1584T, rs1816071, rs194072, rs252944 and rs187269, were found to be significantly associated, and their haplotypes in linkage disequilibrium, with schizophrenia. This represents the first report on any disease association of SNPs in the human GABAA receptor genes, and focuses attention on the GABAergic hypothesis of schizophrenia etiology.3,4
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Professor Laszlo Endrenyi and Professor J Tze-Fei Wong for helpful discussion, Professor Huimin Zhu for assistance in sample collections, and Miss Peggy Lee for technical support. We wish to thank the Innovation and Technology Fund of the Government of Hong Kong, and PharmacoGenetics Limited, for financial support.
Competing interests statement: We declare that we have no competing financial interests.
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URLs for databases and program used herein are as follows:
ARLEQUIN, http://lgb.unige.ch/arleguin/
Blastn, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/BLAST/
dbSNP, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/SNP/
GENEPOP, http://wbiomed.curtin.edu.au/genepop/
Primer3, http://www-genome.wi.mit.edu/cgi-bin/primer/primer3_www.cgi
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Lo, WS., Lau, CF., Xuan, Z. et al. Association of SNPs and haplotypes in GABAA receptor β2 gene with schizophrenia. Mol Psychiatry 9, 603–608 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.mp.4001461
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.mp.4001461
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