Comprehensive functional annotation of susceptibility SNPs prioritized 10 genes for schizophrenia

Nearly 95% of susceptibility SNPs identified by genome-wide association studies (GWASs) are located in non-coding regions, which causes a lot of difficulty in deciphering their biological functions on disease pathogenesis. Here, we aimed to conduct a comprehensive functional annotation for all the schizophrenia susceptibility loci obtained from GWASs. Considering varieties of epigenomic regulatory elements, we annotated all 22,688 acquired susceptibility SNPs according to their genomic positions to obtain functional SNPs. The comprehensive annotation indicated that these functional SNPs are broadly involved in diverse biological processes. Histone modification enrichment showed that H3K27ac, H3K36me3, H3K4me1, and H3K4me3 were related to the development of schizophrenia. Transcription factors (TFs) prediction, methylation quantitative trait loci (meQTL) analyses, expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) analyses, and proteomic quantitative trait loci analyses (pQTL) identified 447 target protein-coding genes. Subsequently, differential expression analyses between schizophrenia cases and controls, nervous system phenotypes from mouse models, and protein–protein interaction with known schizophrenia-related pathways and genes were carried out with our target genes. We finaly prioritized 10 target genes for schizophrenia (CACNA1C, CLU, CSNK2B, GABBR1, GRIN2A, MAPK3, NOTCH4, SRR, TNF, and SYNGAP1). Our results may serve as an encyclopedia of schizophrenia susceptibility SNPs and offer holistic guides for post-GWAS functional experiments.