Transmission disequilibrium analysis of the GSN gene in a cohort of family trios with schizophrenia

Apoptosis is thought to play a role in neuronal pathology in schizophrenia. Recently, the GSN gene was reported to have anti-apoptotic properties. In a genome-wide expression analysis on schizophrenia, GSN was also found to be significantly down-regulated in schizophrenia. All the hints suggest that GSN is a novel candidate gene in occurrence of schizophrenia. In this work, we genotyped 3 SNPs around the GSN locus in 493 sets of the Han Chinese trio sample using allele-specific PCR. A weak association or a marginally positive result was detected (0.05 for P-value of the overtransmitted haplotype and 0.02 for a global P-value).