Studies on the altered expression of genes in the autopsy brain of people with schizophrenia

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To study the change of gene expression in the brain tissues of schizophrenia, we used the gene expression monitoring technology and compared two sets of pools containing each four RNA samples of frontal cortex that were randomly selected from the control or schizophrenia group. We found that the expression of two genes were commonly altered in four pairwise comparisons; the expression of DEAD-box protein p gene was increased and neuropeptide Y (NPY) gene expression was decreased in the schizophrenia group compared with the control group. To substantiate these results, we estimated their mRNA levels by the real time TaqMan method in the 15 samples of each frontal or temporal cortex of four matched groups of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression and normal control. A statistically significant decrease was observed for NPY in the frontal, but not in the temporal, cortex in the schizophrenia group (p = 0.003). A decrease was also observed in the frontal cortex of the bipolar disorder group (p = 0.031). In contrast, p72 gene expression showed no significant difference among the four groups. In conclusion, by novel technology of DNA array and TaqMan PCR analyses, we found that neuropeptide Y mRNA levels were significantly reduced in the frontal cortex in both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.