The role of zinc finger family genes in schizophrenia — ASN Events
  1. Schedule
  2. Poster Session 2
  3. The role of zinc finger family genes in schizophrenia

The role of zinc finger family genes in schizophrenia (#273)

Kuo-Chuan Huang 1 , Theresa Tsun-Hui Tsao 2 , Sheng-An Lee 3 , Ko-Chun Yang 4
  1. Department of psychiatry, Beitou Branch, Tri-service general hospital, Taipei, Taiwan
  2. Department of Biochemical Science and Technology,, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
  3. Department of Information Management, Kainan University, Taoyuan, Taiwan
  4. Graduate Institute of Biomedical Electronics and Bioinformatics, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan

Schizophrenia is believed to be a progressive brain disorder, along with reduction of brain size especially in hippocampus, thalamus, temporal lobe and prefrontal cortex. The molecular function of zinc family genes which encoded zinc finger proteins are found to be the most abundant and broadly diversely distributed including biological functions such as DNA recognition, transcription activity, regulation of apoptosis and protein folding and assembly. GWAS and SNP study have identified one of zinc finger family genes, ZNF804A as a susceptible gene and is strongly associated with schizophrenia.

In order to explore the relationships between zinc finger family genes and schizophrenia, the schizophrenic zinc-finger mediator network(SZFMN) was constructed to illustrate the interaction between schizophrenic candidate genes and zinc family genes. Important hub genes in SZFMN included ZNF174, ZNF195, ZNF200, ZNF259, TP53 and UBC. In different literature reviews, the over-expressed zinc finger genes are ZNF 24 and ZNF200. The under-expressed zinc finger genes are ZNF148, ZNF174, ZNF195, ZNF200 and ZNF512. ZNF200 revealed inconsistent expression level in different literatures.

The SZFMN revealed connection of zinc finger genes and schizophrenic candidate genes which implicates the dysfunction of zinc finger genes may be associated with brain atrophy and contribute to the important disease mechanisms of schizophrenia.