Bioinformatics and Quantitative Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction Analysis of SUCNR1 and GPR37L1 in Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a severe, complex, and multifactorial mental disorder involving numerous genetic susceptibility elements, leading to substantial disability, morbidity, and mortality. Despite significant progress in understanding its pathophysiology and etiology, specific diagnostic biomarkers for schizophrenia remain elusive. This study aimed to identify candidate molecular markers associated with schizophrenia. An integrated bioinformatics analysis was performed on the public microarray dataset GSE54913. Gene Ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway analyses revealed that the most significantly enriched GO terms were related to channel activity, including passive transmembrane transporter activity, ion channel activity, gated channel activity, and substrate-specific channel activity. The top five enriched KEGG pathways were insulin secretion, cAMP signaling pathway, nucleotide excision repair, TNF signaling pathway, and glutathione metabolism. Validation was conducted using quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) on an independent sample set from Wuhan Rongjun Youfu Hospital. The qRT-PCR results were largely consistent with the microarray analysis (Pearson r = 0.89, 95% CI: 0.66-0.97). Protein-protein interaction (PPI) network analysis identified two hub genes, SUCNR1 and GPR37L1, which were significantly associated with the GO term 'ion channel activity' and enriched in the KEGG pathway 'insulin secretion'. Furthermore, SUCNR1 expression showed a negative correlation with verbal memory scores (r = -0.54, P = 0.015), whereas GPR37L1 expression showed a positive correlation (r = 0.59, P = 0.0034). These findings suggest that altered SUCNR1 and GPR37L1 expression may be associated with schizophrenia and may represent candidate molecular markers for further investigation.