| Schizophrenia is a common mental disease that affects approximately 1% of the population with a devastating effect on the patients' lives . Much genetic evidence has support that it is a polygenic disorder. The current working hypothesis for schizophrenia is that multiple genes of small to moderate effect confer compounding risk, through interactions with each other and with non-genetic risk factors. Pharmacological, neurochemical, and clinical evidence has provided a number of schizophrenia susceptibility loci. In response to the need for the systematic searches for genes of small effect in schizophrenia, VSD is established to provide variation data of publicly available candidate genes.Most of candidate genes are coding for neurotransmitter receptors, neurotransmitter transporters and enzymes involved in their metabolism, other susceptibility genes extracted from published literatures were also included. The variation information is harvested from public mutation and polymorphism databases, such as dbSNP (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/SNP). HGVbase (http://hgvbase.cgb.ki.se) and OMIM (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/omim). Except for variation data, gene descriptions, enzyme information and other biological information for each gene locus are also included.Since RefSeq of NCBI (http://www:.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/LocusLink/refseq.html) provides reference sequence standards for the complete genomic nucleic acids, transcripts and proteins, it is used as reference positioning variations at the three levels in VSD.The nonsynonymous SNPs (nsSNPs) located in protein functional sites or domains are pointed out, since they are more likely to affect the protein function than other nsSNPs and would be selected as target SNPs for association study. VSD provides graphical view of relationship between nsSNPs and protein features for most gene loci.VSD lastly contains 14484 variations assigned to total 167 genes, 78.8% are within...
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