Gene expression analysis of neurons differentiated from iPS cells generated from the fibroblasts of monozygotic twins discordant for schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is heterogenious and polygenic disorder, and thus obtaining geneticly close control samples are valuable to increase the effect size. We obtained skin biopsies from five identical twin pairs discordant for schizophrenia and reprogrammed the cells to induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). They are all Finnish/Caucasians, and the study was approved by ethical commitee in Finland. As schizophrenia affects mostly cognitive functions, we differentiated iPSCs to cortical neurons, moslty excitatory glutamatergic neurons and performed RNA sequencing for transcriptomic changes in neurons from patients with schizophrenia. Ribo-depleted RNA was sequenced with Illumina Next-seq 500 from iPS derived neurons