Systematic screening of the 14-3-3 eta (eta) chain gene for polymorphic variants and case-control analysis in schizophrenia

The neuronal protein 14-3-3 eta is a candidate gene for schizophrenia because it maps chromosome 22q12, a region implicated in the disease by Linkage analysis, and is involved in brain development We systematically screened this gene for polymorphic variants by comparison of public EST sequence data (five cDNAs and 72 ESTs, 21,155 bp of sequence) in parallel with single-stranded conformational polymorphism analysis, and we compared these methods by using a simple power calculation. Twelve potential polymorphisms mere identified from EST sequence comparison, and two of these (a 5'-VNTR and 753G/A) were confirmed by SSCP analysis and sequencing. Three additional infrequent polymorphisms (-408T/G; 177 C/G; and 989 A/G) were found by SSCP only. We next examined these variants for association with schizophrenia. One variant in untranslated region of exon I (-408 T/G) was found to occur more frequently in the schizophrenic subjects (8%) than the controls (3%; P = 0.01). After fivefold correction of the P value for multiple testing, marginal association was found. Haplotype analysis of pairs of polymorphisms provided no evidence for association of this gene with schizophrenia in the population studied. (C) 2000 Wiley-Liss, Inc.