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Funded by National Institute of Mental Health grant number NIH/NIMH R01MH66004,"Schizophrenia Liability Genes among African  Americans" (09/18/2002-07/31/2007), Santos, Alberto B., Principal Investigator

Schizophrenia, which can cause severe disturbances in a person’s mood, beliefs, and perceptions, afflicts over 1% of adults world wide. The goal of this project is to identify the presence of genes that underlie family liability to  schizophrenia by using both linkage and admixture mapping. The study's specific aims are t (1) Recruit and assess three family samples, each with at least one family member diagnosed as suffering from Schizophrenia diagnosed by DSM-IV criteria; (2) Perform a genome scan to detect regions potentially harboring liability genes for Schizophrenia; (3) Determine the heritability of the neurocognitive phenotypes and their relationships to the clinical phenotypes; (4) Perform multipoint Quantitative Trait Locus (QTL) linkage analyses using the endophenotypes; (5) Follow-up the 10 candidate regions of interest from aim 2 with fine mapping methods; (6) Perform family-based association tests on a small set of Schizophrenia-liability candidate genes in each candidate region of interest; and (7) Establish a publicly accessible resource of data per NIMH Human  Genetics Initiative guidelines.

This is a multi-site collaboration involving Duke University, The University of Pennsylvania, The University of Pittsburgh, The University of Mississippi, The University of Tennessee, The University of Alabama at Birmingham, Morehouse College of Medicine, and the Medical University of South Carolina. This consortium was formed in order to recruit a total sample of 1260  families all of whom have  This sample size would be impossible to recruit without multiple participating sites using the same protocol.  This is the most comprehensive study of its kind. The integration of diagnostic, neurocognitive and genetic data being collected should provide the most powerful data set ever assembled using common diagnostic and neurocognitive phenotyping protocols. MUSC personnel working on this project include co-investigators Drs. Al Santos, Steven McLeod-Bryant,  Kit Simpson, and Mark Hamner, and research associates Cynthia Gilliard, Mary Brown, Shirley Hendrix, Wanda Smalls-Smith,  Monica Molloy, Sandy Witman, and RajSarang.