TY - JOUR PY - 2016// TI - Schizophrenia risk from complex variation of complement component 4 JO - Nature A1 - Sekar, Aswin A1 - Bialas, Allison R. A1 - Rivera, Heather de A1 - Davis, Avery A1 - Hammond, Timothy R. A1 - Kamitaki, Nolan A1 - Tooley, Katherine A1 - Presumey, Jessy A1 - Baum, Matthew A1 - Doren, Vanessa Van A1 - Genovese, Giulio A1 - Rose, Samuel A. A1 - Handsaker, Robert E. A1 - Schizophrenia Working Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, A1 - Daly, Mark J. A1 - Carroll, Michael C. A1 - Stevens, Beth A1 - McCarroll, Steven A. SP - 177 EP - 183 VL - 530 IS - 7589 N2 - Schizophrenia is a heritable brain illness with unknown pathogenic mechanisms. Schizophrenia's strongest genetic association at a population level involves variation in the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) locus, but the genes and molecular mechanisms accounting for this have been challenging to identify. Here we show that this association arises in part from many structurally diverse alleles of the complement component 4 (C4) genes. We found that these alleles generated widely varying levels of C4A and C4B expression in the brain, with each common C4 allele associating with schizophrenia in proportion to its tendency to generate greater expression of C4A. Human C4 protein localized to neuronal synapses, dendrites, axons, and cell bodies. In mice, C4 mediated synapse elimination during postnatal development. These results implicate excessive complement activity in the development of schizophrenia and may help explain the reduced numbers of synapses in the brains of individuals with schizophrenia.
Language: en
LA - en SN - 0028-0836 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature16549 ID - ref1 ER -