In the development of schizophrenia, genetic factors are thought to play important roles, Schizophrenia is know as a complex genetic/multifactorial/polygenic disorder and is influenced by both nature and nurture. However, the mode of inheritance
and the
gene numbers involved are still elusive. In addition, heterogeneity, phenocopy, incomplete penetrance and the psychological characteristics which are hard to be defined cleary, act as obstacles to elucidate genetic properties. These are thought
to
be
the main reasons that there are no significantly conclusive and consistent results in the genetic linkage and/or association studies of schizophrenia in spite of recent progresses of molecular genetics such as Human Genome Project, microarray,
DNA
chips, and automated high throughput SNPs technologies. So, recently to overcome these hurdles in finding genes with susceptibility to schizophrenia, (1) large scale collaboration studies rather than small scale individual investigator based
studies and
(2) changing strategies for both sampling subjects and methodology of study have been suggested. These alternate strategies are though to provide poserful tools. Also, in this near post-genomic era, proteomics, forward genetics, functional
genetics and
epigenetics (rather than structural genomics and reverse genetics such as linkage and association studies) look to be more hopeful. Interaction between nature and nurture needs to be examined more carefully by quantitative genetics. In
conclusion,
high
biotechnology, bioinformatics, re-classification and finding biological phenotypes of schizophrenia and epigenetics may lead us to cautious optaimism of figuring out the reality-based schizophrenia genetics in the post-genomic era.
|