RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Schizotypy-related magnetization of cortex in healthy adolescence is co-located with expression of schizophrenia risk genes
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 487108
DO 10.1101/487108
A1 Rafael Romero-Garcia
A1 Jakob Seidlitz
A1 Kirstie J Whitaker
A1 Sarah E Morgan
A1 Peter Fonagy
A1 Raymond J Dolan
A1 Peter B Jones
A1 Ian M Goodyer
A1 John Suckling
A1 the NSPN Consortium
A1 Petra E Vértes
A1 Edward T Bullmore
YR 2018
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/12/04/487108.abstract
AB Genetic risk is thought to drive phenotypic variation on a spectrum of schizophrenia-like social and cognitive personality traits; but the intermediate phenotype of brain structural variation that mechanistically links sequence variation to schizotypal experience and behavior is unclear. We assessed schizotypy through a self-reported questionnaire, and measured magnetization transfer (MT), as a putative MRI marker of intra-cortical myelination, in 68 brain regions, in 248 healthy young people (aged 14-25 years). We found that magnetization was positively correlated with schizotypy scores in bilateral regions of posterior cingulate cortex and precuneus (FDR-corrected P < 0.05). Meta-analysis of prior normative functional MRI data indicated that this area of schizotypy-related magnetization is specialized for memory and social cognitive functions that are impaired in schizophrenia. Using prior data from case-control studies of human brain gene transcription post mortem, we found that schizotypy-related magnetization was significantly correlated with transcriptional dysregulation in schizophrenia. The proteins coded by genes that were both positively weighted on schizotypy-related magnetization and significantly down-regulated in schizophrenia formed a dense, complex network of interactions for neuronal signaling. We conclude that intra-cortical magnetization - putatively a marker of myelinated neurons - is a plausible brain phenotype of schizotypy and represents some genetic risks for schizophrenia.