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. 2020 Feb 4;21(1):11.
doi: 10.1186/s12863-020-0819-8.

Parental warmth interacts with several genes to affect executive function components: a genome-wide environment interaction study

Chunhui Chen  1   2 , Chuansheng Chen  3 , Gui Xue  1 , Qi Dong  1 , Libo Zhao  4 , Shudong Zhang  5
Affiliations

Parental warmth interacts with several genes to affect executive function components: a genome-wide environment interaction study

Chunhui Chen et al. BMC Genet. .

Abstract

Background: Executive function (EF) is vital to human beings. It has been linked to many genes and family environmental factors in separate studies, but few studies have examined the potential interactions between gene(s) and environmental factor(s). The current study explored the whole genome to identify SNPs, genes, and pathways that interacted with parental warmth (PW) on EF.

Results: Nine EF tasks were used to measure its three components (common EF, updating, shifting) based on the model proposed by Miyake et al. (2000). We found that rs111605473, LAMP5, SLC4A7, and LRRK1 interacted significantly with PW to affect the updating component of EF, and the GSE43955 pathway interacted significantly with PW to affect the common EF component.

Conclusions: The current study is the first to identify genes that interacted with PW to affect EF. Further studies are needed to reveal the underlying mechanism.

Keywords: Executive function; Gene set enrichment analysis; Gene-environment interaction; Parental warmth.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Confirmatory factor analysis of the componential executive function model
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Projection of the current study samples onto the first two principal components inferred from the 1000 Genomes Project’s phase3 populations. The current study sample overlapped with East Asian (EAS) and Han Chinese populations
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Manhattan plot of genome-wide interaction with PW for updating. Each dot represents the p value of a SNP-by-PW interaction. X axis shows the chromosomal positions of the SNPs, and Y axis shows –log10 transformed interaction p values. The dashed line represents p = 5E-8. Only one SNP at chromosome 1 survived this genome-wide significance threshold
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Interaction effects of representative SNPs listed in Table 2. The X axis represents PW and the Y axis represents EF components with age, gender, and first two principal components of genome regressed out, to keep consistent with GWEIS analysis. Each subplot A-G showed one interaction effect presented in Table 2, correlations between EF and PW are shown for different genotype groups
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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