Inherited catatonic schizophrenia (ICS) is characterised by acute psychotic episodes with hallucinations, delusions and disturbed body movements. In the latest issue of
Jobst Meyer and colleagues from Julius-Maximilians-University, Wuerzburg, Germany, used PCR to screen the genes on human chromosome 22 in a large family with ICS. The authors found a mutation that co-segregates with ICS, in a gene that encodes a protein called WKL1 (
WKL1 shares some features with ion channels and the transcript is expressed exclusively in the brain. In the mutated form of WKL1, a leucine amino acid residue is replaced by a methionine (L309M) within one of seven transmembrane domains. Mutations in the potassium channel KCNA1, which is distantly related to WKL1, cause episodic ataxia — a ...