Cell-Specific Gene Expression in the Prenatal Brain and Schizophrenia Risk

Abstract

While a variety of evidence supports a prenatal component to schizophrenia, the relevant cell types of the developing brain have, to date, been unclear. To explore cellular mediators of schizophrenia genetic risk in early brain development, Cameron et al. (1), in the current issue of Biological Psychiatry, applied single-nuclei RNA sequencing (snRNA-seq) technology and analyses to 5 regions of the human prenatal brain and combined this with the latest data from gene discovery for the condition from both a genome-wide association study (GWAS) (2) and an exome sequencing study (3).