A study involving more than 60 psychiatric hospitals around the world allowed us to discover how gene networks communicate through the brain and identify 641 new genes associated with schizophrenia, has been released today.
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22/06/2026
by
Lusa
Iresearchers at the Lieber Institute for Brain Development at Johns Hopkins University in the United States and a consortium of collaborators at Bari University in Italy analyzed genetic data from over 100,000 individuals and brain tissue samples from six brain regions of hundreds of donors.
According to scientists, traditional methods for associating genes with diseases only examine variants in the vicinity of the genes concerned, although it is known that most of their involvement in a disease depends on long-range variants.
In an innovative approach, the study research team, published today in Nature Genetics, “developed new computational models that apprehend long-range regulatory relationships between genes, in a similar way to how social networks connect people who do not live close to each other“, indicates the Spanish news agency EFE.
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“ Most genetic studies focused on finding light under the pole, paying attention only to genes close to DNA variants associated with diseases,” said researcher Giulio Pergola of the Lieber Institute for Brain Development, senior author of the work.
“ Athe incorporation of genetic co-expression networks, essentially we turn the lights on throughout the neighborhood, revealing how distant genetic variants coordinate to build the genetic basis of schizophrenia“, explained quoted by EFS.
The findings point to biological pathways involved in glutamate signaling (neurotransmitter), communication between brain cells, immune processes and brain development, which can help guide future research on new strategies to treat this mental illness.
“ This work demonstrates that the risk of schizophrenia is not limited to individual genes that act sequentially, but rather to the way gene networks work together,” said Daniel Weinberger, director of the Lieber Institute for Brain Development.
Researchers suggest that understanding these coordinated genetic programs can bring professionals closer to “precision psychiatry”, with treatments that can be customized for the specific biological profile of each individual.