[Replicative study of susceptibility to childhood-onset schizophrenia in Kazakhs]

This paper reports the results of replicative analysis of associations of 15 SNPs in a region of 14 genes previously identified in genome-wide association studies (GWAS) with early-onset schizophrenia in Kazakhs. An association of early-onset schizophrenia with genetic markers in three genes (VRK2, KCNB2, and CPVL) was found. An association of rs2312147 in the VRK2 gene with schizophrenia was also previously reported in the Chinese population, so this marker may be considered as possibly race-specific. Two groups consisting of four and six genes demonstrating intergenic epistatic interactions were revealed by multifactor dimensionality reduction methods. The gene ontologies of 14 studied genes were reduced to variants of one molecular function (peptidase activity) and one biological process (positive regulation of biosynthesis processes). Bioinformatic analysis of the protein-protein interactions of products of the genes under study demonstrates that the products of six out of 14 genes may be involved in a single interrelated network, the major connecting link of which is represented by their ubiquitination by the UBC protein.