An association study of ninety-three candidate genes in bipolar disorder

D. Absher; J. Li; R.C. Thompson; M. Burmeister; L.J. Scott; Y. Li; F. Meng; W. Guan; M. P. Vawter;; P. Choudary; H. Tomita ;S. J. Evans; W.E. Bunney; E.G. Jones; J.D. Barchas; A. Schatzberg; H. Akil; S.J. Watson; M. Boehnke; R.M. Myers
American Society of Human Genetics. 2006.

Abstract

Bipolar disorder is a psychiatric disease with a prevalence of ~1% in all human populations. It displays strong familial aggregation and is thought to result from a complex genetic etiology involving multiple genes. While linkage studies have identified some loci of interest, few of these have been confirmed in subsequent studies. We have undertaken a candidate gene approach that involves genotyping 476 bipolar cases and 470 controls for 1536 SNPs located in 93 genes. The bipolar cases are from the NIMH Human Genetics Initiative¿s collection and the controls are ethnically matched NIMH control samples that have completed a psychiatric screen. We selected genes for this study based on their association with bipolar disease in previous studies, as well as their aberrant expression in our microarray experiments with human brain mRNA, and their implication in animal models with similar phenotypes. For each of the 93 genes, we selected SNPs from HapMap II to cover all LD bins (r2 > 0.8) containing SNPs with a MAF > =5%. All genotyping is being performed with Illumina¿s GoldenGate platform. We will present our preliminary findings.