Random or stochastic monoallelic expressed genes are enriched for neurodevelopmental disorder candidate genes

Abstract

Random or stochastic monoallelic expressed genes (StMA genes) represent a unique form of monoallelic expression where allelic choice is made at random early in development. The consequential clonal diversity provides opportunity for functional heterozygosity in tissues such as the brain, and can impact on both development and disease. We investigate the relationship of StMA expressed genes previously identified in clonal neural stem cells with the neurodevelopmental disorders autism and schizophrenia. We found that StMA genes show an overrepresentation of schizophrenia risk candidates identified by genome wide association studies from the genetic association database. Similar suggestive enrichment was also found for genes from the NHGRI genome-wide association study catalog and a psychiatric genetics consortium schizophrenia dataset although these latter more robust gene lists did not achieve statistical significance. We also examined multiple sources of copy number variation (CNV) datasets from autism and schizophrenia cohorts. After taking into account total gene numbers and CNV size, both autism and schizophrenia associated CNVs appeared to show an enrichment of StMA genes relative to the control CNV datasets. Since the StMA genes were originally identified in neural stem cells, bias due to the neural transcriptome is possible. To address this, we randomly sampled neural stem cell expressed genes and repeated the tests. After a significant number of iterations, neural stem cell expressed genes did not show an overrepresentation in autism or schizophrenia CNV datasets. Therefore, irrespective of the neural derived transcriptome, StMA genes originally identified in neural stem cells show an overrepresentation in CNVs associated with autism and schizophrenia. If this association is functional, then the regulation (or dysregulation) of this form of allelic expression status within tissues such as the brain may be a contributory risk factor for neurodevelopmental disorders and may also influence disease discordance sometimes observed in monozygotic twins.

Figure 1. Representation of StMA gene occurrence (per 1000 CNV mapped genes) in autism CNV datasets (blue), schizophrenia (purple) and control datasets (green).

The “dbVAR controls” represents a reference dataset created from the merger of all CNV loci derived from a series of control population datasets (shown in light green).