Schizophrenia: from genetics to biology to predictive medicine

Identifying genes for psychiatric disorders using traditional genetic approaches has thus far proven quite difficult. Reasons for this include the complexity of these disorders and the poor definition of the clinical phenotype. However, recent studies have demonstrated the power of an approach called convergent functional genomics (CFG). CFG is a methodology that integrates different types of data to increase the ability to identify genes involved in various psychiatric and nonpsychiatric disorders. The work exemplified in this article integrated human brain and blood gene expression data, relevant animal model brain and blood gene expression data, and human genetic data to identify candidate genes and blood biomarkers for schizophrenia.