Schizophrenia genes: On the matter of their convergence

Abstract

Schizophrenia is a common mental disorder, affecting 0.5–1% of the population. The mode of inheritance is complex and non-Mendelian with a high heritability of ca. 65–80%. Given this complexity, until most recently it was difficult to identify disease genes. But fortunately this has changed. Due to new technologies the last few years have brought highest interest in human genetics of complex diseases. The knowledge resulting from the availability of the complete sequence of the human genome, the systematic identification of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) throughout the genome, and the development of parallel genotyping technology (microarrays) established the conditions that brought about the current successful time in our ability to probe the genome for identifying disease genes. All these studies showed up new avenues for the biology of common complex diseases and yielded a multitude of genes showing strong association with complex diseases.