Biomedical subjects

Ben S Pickard

Publications and source records attributed to Ben S Pickard.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Disruption of a brain transcription factor, NPAS3, is associated with schizophrenia and learning disability.

A mother and daughter diagnosed with schizophrenia and schizophrenia co-morbid with mild learning disability, respectively, possess a balanced reciprocal translocation t(9,14)(q34.2;q13). Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) with YAC, BAC, and cosmid probes indicate that the chromosome 14q13 breakpoint disrupts a large gene, NPAS3, encoding a CNS expressed transcription factor of the basic helix-loop-helix PAS (bHLH-PAS) gene family. By analogy with other members of the bHLH-PAS family, the putative truncated protein generated from the disrupted gene locus may have a dominant negative effect. The 14q13 region was previously identified by a linkage study of an inherited neurodegenerative condition, idiopathic basal ganglia calcification (IBGC or Fahr syndrome, OMIM:213600/606656), which is often co-morbid with psychosis. Sequencing of the gene in a third patient diagnosed with IBGC, schizophrenia, and mild learning disability did not reveal functional mutations.

Abnormalities, Multiple↗

PubMed2005

Speeding disease gene discovery by sequence based candidate prioritization.

BACKGROUND: Regions of interest identified through genetic linkage studies regularly exceed 30 centimorgans in size and can contain hundreds of genes. Traditionally this number is reduced by matching functional annotation to knowledge of the disease or phenotype in question. However, here we show that disease genes share patterns of sequence-based features that can provide a good basis for automatic prioritization of candidates by machine learning. RESULTS: We examined a variety of sequence-based features and found that for many of them there are significant differences between the sets of genes known to be involved in human hereditary disease and those not known to be involved in disease. We have created an automatic classifier called PROSPECTR based on those features using the alternating decision tree algorithm which ranks genes in the order of likelihood of involvement in disease. On average, PROSPECTR enriches lists for disease genes two-fold 77% of the time, five-fold 37% of the time and twenty-fold 11% of the time. CONCLUSION: PROSPECTR is a simple and effective way to identify genes involved in Mendelian and oligogenic disorders. It performs markedly better than the single existing sequence-based classifier on novel data. PROSPECTR could save investigators looking at large regions of interest time and effort by prioritizing positional candidate genes for mutation detection and case-control association studies.

Algorithms↗

PubMed2005

Candidate psychiatric illness genes identified in patients with pericentric inversions of chromosome 18.

Both the long and short arms of chromosome 18 have been consistently identified as potential locations for schizophrenia and bipolar affective disorder susceptibility genes. We previously described the identification of two independent pericentric inversions of chromosome 18 [inv(18)(p11.31;q21.2) and inv(18)(p11.31;q21.1)] occurring in two small families in which carriers have been diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar affective disorder, respectively. Using fluorescence in situ hybridization on patient metaphase chromosomes we have identified the locations of all four chromosome breakpoints in the inversion carriers. Neither pericentric inversion results in a direct gene disruption. However, each inversion breakpoint has the potential to perturb local gene expression by position effect or by the separation of important regulatory (enhancer) sequences from the core gene sequences. Five genes in the localities of the breakpoints have been identified as good candidates for the genetic basis of psychiatric illness in these families; TTMA, a novel membrane spanning protein; TCF4, a basic helix-loop-helix transcription factor; DLGAP1, an interactor of the PSD-95 synaptic protein; and ARKL1 and ARKL2, novel members of the ubiquitin ligase gene family.

Amino Acid Sequence↗

PubMed2004

A 4q35.2 subtelomeric deletion identified in a screen of patients with co-morbid psychiatric illness and mental retardation.

BACKGROUND: Cryptic structural abnormalities within the subtelomeric regions of chromosomes have been the focus of much recent research because of their discovery in a percentage of people with mental retardation (UK terminology: learning disability). These studies focused on subjects (largely children) with various severities of intellectual impairment with or without additional physical clinical features such as dysmorphisms. However it is well established that prevalence of schizophrenia is around three times greater in those with mild mental retardation. The rates of bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder have also been reported as increased in people with mental retardation. We describe here a screen for telomeric abnormalities in a cohort of 69 patients in which mental retardation co-exists with severe psychiatric illness. METHODS: We have applied two techniques, subtelomeric fluorescence in situ hybridisation (FISH) and multiplex amplifiable probe hybridisation (MAPH) to detect abnormalities in the patient group. RESULTS: A subtelomeric deletion was discovered involving loss of 4q in a patient with co-morbid schizoaffective disorder and mental retardation. CONCLUSION: The precise region of loss has been defined allowing us to identify genes that may contribute to the clinical phenotype through hemizygosity. Interestingly, the region of 4q loss exactly matches that linked to bipolar affective disorder in a large multiply affected Australian kindred.

Chromosome Deletion↗