Quantitative protein expression study in the postmortem brains of patients with schizophrenia‐ALDH4A1 expression and its association with genetic polymorphism

Abstract

Protein expression studies in postmortem brain are necessary for investigating molecular mechanisms underlying the pathogenesis of neuropsychiatric disorders including schizophrenia. Since there are a number of confounding factors originated from various conditions other than pathological conditions in postmortem brain studies, so it is vital that evaluate and control them carefully. We have investigated the relationship between the expression level of candidate proteins in the postmortem brain of schizophrenia as an intermediate phenotype and their association with single nucleotide polymorphism (SNPs) . These studies have conducted using the postmortem brain samples with mainly psychiatric diseases preserved at Fukushima Brain Bank and them with healthy controls preserved at Brain Research Institute, Niigata University. In this article, we show the investigation whether differences between two different brain banks had any effect on protein expression in postmortem brain samples, and the study of Aldehyde dehydrogenase 4 family member A1 (ALDH4A1) expression levels in postmortem brains of patients with schizophrenia and their association with SNPs.