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Researchers from 15 institutions have completed the most comprehensive genomic analysis of the human brain yet, generating new insight into the molecular mechanisms underpinning brain development and neuropsychiatric illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The results, produced by the PsychENCODE Consortium, appears in 10 publications yesterday (December 13) in Science, Science Translational Medicine, and Science Advances.
“We’re not claiming in the remotest way to have figured out the underlying mechanism of these diseases, or how you would go about designing drugs,” Yale University’s Mark Gerstein, a molecular biophysicist who was involved in several of the studies, tells Nature. “But we are highlighting genes, pathways and also cell types that are associated with these diseases.”
The PsychENCODE project, which was established in 2015, has so far analyzed more than 2,100 brain bank samples representing people with and without psychiatric disorders. In the latest studies, researchers analyzed DNA, ...
