Chromatin interactions at risk loci links ATP5MD to schizophrenia

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have accelerated the discovery of numerous genetic variants associated with schizophrenia. However, most risk variants show a small effect size (odds ratio (OR)<1.2), suggesting that more functional risk variants remain to be identified. Here, we employed region-based multi-marker analysis of genomic annotation (MAGMA) to identify additional risk loci containing variants with large OR value from Psychiatry Genomics Consortium (PGC2) schizophrenia GWAS data and then employed summary-data-based mendelian randomization (SMR) to prioritize schizophrenia susceptibility genes. The top-ranked susceptibility gene ATP5MD, encoding an ATP synthase membrane subunit, is observed to be downregulated in schizophrenia by the risk allele of CNNM2-rs1926032 in the schizophrenia-associated 10q24.32 locus. Overall design: Examination of chromatin interaction between rs1926032 and ATP5MD.