Gene expression in patient-derived neural progenitors provide insights into neurodevelopmental aspects of schizophrenia

The PGC2 schizophrenia (SCZ) GWAS shows that variation in non-coding regions is responsible for most of the common variation heritability of the disease, suggesting risk variants alter gene expression. Therefore, comparing differences in gene expression between cases and controls may provide a direct approach for studying the etiology of SCZ. We studied transcriptome expression profiles of Cultured Neural progenitor cells derived from Olfactory Neuroepithelium lines (CNON) from 144 SCZ and 111 control individuals using RNA-Seq and identified 53 differentially expressed (DEX) genes (FDR