Abstract
Many genomic and epigenomic studies have been conducted on postmortem brains to elucidate the etiology of psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. However, because the brain is an extremely heterogeneous tissue composed of many cell types, it is difficult to distinguish whether findings in studies using bulk tissue simply reflect differences in the proportions of cell types within the tissue or whether they actually indicate disease‐related phenotypes. To address this issue, we isolated neuronal and non‐neuronal cell nuclei from the postmortem brains of patients with psychiatric disorders and performed omics analyses. In this article, we review recent studies on somatic mutation in patients with schizophrenia and DNA methylation analysis in patients with bipolar disorder. Both studies revealed findings specific to neurons in the patient groups, and further validation is expected.
