Project description:The Ashkenazi Jewish population has long been considered a genetic isolate and presumed to have the genetic signatures of founder effects and isolation. We genotyped a large cohort of Ashkenazi Jews and analyzed their genetic structure compared to other worldwide populations. We genotyped 471 normal control Ashkenazi Jewish individuals with the Affymetrix 6.0 array and analyzed their genetic structure relative to other Europe and worldwide populations. We measured heterozygosity, linkage disequilibrium, identity-by-descent and used extended haplotype tests of positive selection.
Project description:The Ashkenazi Jewish population has long been considered a genetic isolate and presumed to have the genetic signatures of founder effects and isolation. We genotyped a large cohort of Ashkenazi Jews and analyzed their genetic structure compared to other worldwide populations.
Project description:Schizophrenia is a severe psychiatric illness that affects ~1% of the population and has a strong genetic underpinning. Recently, genome wide analysis of copy number variation (CNV) has implicated rare and de novo events as important in schizophrenia. Here we report a genome-wide analysis of 245 schizophrenia cases and 490 controls, all of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. Since many studies have found an excess burden of large, rare deletions in cases, we limited our analysis to deletions over 500 kb in size. We observed seven large, rare deletions in cases with 57% of these being de novo. We focused on one 836 kb de novo deletion at chromosome 3q29 that falls within a 1.3–1.6 Mb deletion previously identified in children with intellectual disability (ID) and autism, as increasing evidence suggests an overlap of specific rare CNVs between autism and schizophrenia. By combining our data with prior CNV studies of schizophrenia and analysis of the data of the Genetic Association Information Network (GAIN), we identified six 3q29 deletions among 7,545 schizophrenic subjects and one among 39,748 controls, resulting in a statistically significant association with schizophrenia (p = 0.02) and an odds ratio estimate of 17 (95% CI: 1.36–1198.4). Moreover, this 3q29 deletion region contains two linkage peaks from prior schizophrenia family studies, and the minimal deletion interval implicates 20 annotated genes, including PAK2 and DLG1, both paralogous to X-linked ID genes and now strong candidates for schizophrenia susceptibility. Copy Number alanysis was performed on 245 cases and 490 controls of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. Samples were analyzed for deletions greater than 500 kb, with 20 or more snps in the interval. Three algorithms were used for analysis, GADA, GLAD and BEAST. The reference was created by using all samples processed here as the reference.
Project description:<p>Schizophrenia is characterized by high heritability (~80%), yet the identification of susceptibility genes has proven extremely challenging. The Ashkenazi Jewish population, derived from a limited number of founders, may be enriched for a subset of susceptibility alleles, which may also have higher odds ratios than those detected by previous studies. GWAS was conducted in a large Ashkenazi case-control cohort, derived from the Hebrew University Genetic Resource, using the Illumina HumanOmni1-Quad BeadChip. </p>
Project description:<p>Schizophrenia is characterized by high heritability (~80%), yet the identification of susceptibility genes has proven extremely challenging. The Ashkenazi Jewish population, derived from a limited number of founders, may be enriched for a subset of susceptibility alleles, which may also have higher odds ratios than those detected by previous studies. GWAS was conducted in a large Ashkenazi case-control cohort, derived from the Hebrew University Genetic Resource, using the Illumina HumanOmni1-Quad BeadChip. </p>