New insights into schizophrenia disease genes interactome in the human brain: emerging targets and therapeutic implications in the postgenomics era.

Schizophrenia, a complex neurological disorder, is comprised of interactions between multiple genetic and environmental factors wherein each of the factors individually exhibits a small effect. In this regard a network-based strategy is best suited to capture the combined effect of multiple genes with their definite pattern of interactions. Given that schizophrenia affects multiple regions of the brain, we postulated that instead of any single specific tissue, a mutual set of interactions occurs between different regions of brain in a well-defined pattern responsible for the disease phenotype. To validate, we constructed and compared tissue specific co-expression networks of schizophrenia candidate genes in twenty diverse brain tissues. As predicted, we observed a common interaction network of certain genes in all the studied brain tissues. We examined fundamental network topologies of the common network to sequester essential common candidates for schizophrenia. We also performed a gene set analysis to identify the essential biological pathways enriched by the common candidates in the network. Finally, the candidate drug targets were prioritized and scored against known available schizophrenic drugs by molecular docking studies. We distinctively identified protein kinases as the top candidates in the network that can serve as probable drug targets for the disease. Conclusively, we propose that a comprehensive study of the connectivity amongst the disease genes themselves may turn out to be more informative to understand schizophrenia disease etiology and the underlying complexity.