Recent studies have found a high genetic similarity of the psychiatric diseases schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, whose disease-specific changes in brain cells show an overlap of more than 70 percent. These changes affect gene expression, i.e., transcription of genes for ...
Read More »A single-cell transcriptomic atlas of human neocortical development
UCLA researchers performed RNA sequencing on 40,000 cells to create a high-resolution single-cell gene expression atlas of developing human cortex, providing the first single-cell characterization of previously uncharacterized cell types, including human subplate neurons, comparisons with bulk tissue, and systematic ...
Read More »RNA-Seq reveals transcriptome-wide isoform-level dysregulation in ASD, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder
Our understanding of the pathophysiology of psychiatric disorders, including autism spectrum disorder (ASD), schizophrenia (SCZ), and bipolar disorder (BD), lags behind other fields of medicine. The diagnosis and study of these disorders currently depend on...
Read More »A new generation of single-cell sequencing methods enables a more detailed brain map
Researchers have developed new single-cell sequencing methods that could be used to map the cell origins of various brain disorders, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. By analyzing individual nuclei of cells from adult human brains, researchers at the ...
Read More »RolyPoly – inferring relevant cell types for complex traits using single-cell gene expression
Previous studies have prioritized trait-relevant cell types by looking for an enrichment of genome-wide association study (GWAS) signal within functional regions. However, these studies are limited in cell resolution by the lack of functional annotations from difficult-to-characterize or rare cell ...
Read More »Researchers identify genetic variants controlling alternative splicing of transcribed RNA in the human brain
from Science Daily – New research has identified sections of DNA associated with altered regulation of gene expression underlying schizophrenia. The implicated loci contribute to schizophrenia risk by affecting alternative splicing, part of the process that translates the same DNA ...
Read More »Total RNA Sequencing reveals microbial communities in human blood and disease specific effects
An increasing body of evidence suggests an important role of the human microbiome in health and disease. Researchers at UCLA have developed a ‘lost and found’ pipeline, which examines high quality unmapped sequence reads for microbial taxonomic classification. Using this ...
Read More »PD_NGSAtlas – a reference database combining next-generation sequencing epigenomic and transcriptomic data for psychiatric disorders
Psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia (SZ) and bipolar disorder (BP) are projected to lead the global disease burden within the next decade. Several lines of evidence suggest that epigenetic- or genetic-mediated dysfunction is frequently present in these disorders. To date, ...
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