A Whole Methylome CpG-SNP Association Study of Psychosis in Blood and Brain Tissue
van den Oord, E.J.C.G.; Clark, S.L.; Xie, L.Ying.; Shabalin, A.A.; Dozmorov, M.G.; Kumar, G.; Vladimirov, V.I.; Magnusson, P.K.E.; Aberg, K.A.
Schizophrenia Bulletin 42(4): 1018-1026
2016
ISSN/ISBN: 0586-7614 PMID: 26656881 DOI: 10.1093/schbul/sbv182
Accession: 057048763
Mutated CpG sites (CpG-SNPs) are potential hotspots for human diseases because in addition to the sequence variation they may show individual differences in DNA methylation. We performed methylome-wide association studies (MWAS) to test whether methylation differences at those sites were associated with schizophrenia. We assayed all common CpG-SNPs with methyl-CpG binding domain protein-enriched genome sequencing (MBD-seq) using DNA extracted from 1408 blood samples and 66 postmortem brain samples (BA10) of schizophrenia cases and controls. Seven CpG-SNPs passed our FDR threshold of 0.1 in the blood MWAS. Of the CpG-SNPs methylated in brain, 94% were also methylated in blood. This significantly exceeded the 46.2% overlap expected by chance (P-value < 1.0×10(-8)) and justified replicating findings from blood in brain tissue. CpG-SNP rs3796293 in IL1RAP replicated (P-value = .003) with the same direction of effects. This site was further validated through targeted bisulfite pyrosequencing in 736 independent case-control blood samples (P-value < 9.5×10(-4)). Our top result in the brain MWAS (P-value = 8.8×10(-7)) was CpG-SNP rs16872141 located in the potential promoter of ENC1. Overall, our results suggested that CpG-SNP methylation may reflect effects of environmental insults and can provide biomarkers in blood that could potentially improve disease management.