A Study On The Relationship Between The Polymorphisms In PLXNB3 And Human Cognitive Ability

Cognitive ability, with about 50% degree of heritability, is one of the most important abilities in people's daily life, and has come into our focus. In recent years, with the development of neurobiology and molecular biology, researches about cognitive ability, especially about the relationship between it and genes using behavioral genetics, behavior genomics and imaging genetics as the methods and tools have become one hotspot in present psychology and genetics fields, which not only is very important to promote the basic researches for emerging cognitive neurogenetics, but also has practical prospects of application for eugenic counseling, development of new medicine, molecular diagnosis of cognitive disorder, children's individualized education in the future.At the moment, more researches are mainly about the relationship between related genes and human nervous or mental disorders and cognitive ability, and these genes mainly involve in neurotransmitter metabolism, signal transduction and nervous system development. During the development of nervous system, the generation of physiological and functional neuronal network requires the precise navigation of axons along specific pathways to their appropriate targets, such as cell bodies, dendrites or other axons. However, researches on the relationship between the involved PLXNB3 gene and human cognitive ability are still rare.In the study, the subjects were consisting of 910 fresh undergraduate and specialized students from all majors of some a college in Xi'an. A battery of cognitive abilities including working memory, central executive function, spatial cognitive ability, long-term memory, verbal cognitive ability and general fluid intelligence was tested among them. Three functional single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) (rs2266879, rs6643791 and rs5987155) and one genetic marker (rs2266885) in PLXNB3 gene were identified based on PCR-SSCP and PCR-RFLP genotyping methods. At last, the collation of data and statistical analysis were finished using FoxPro6.0, Haploview4.0 and SPSS 10.0 software package.The one-way ANOVA analysis based on general linear model showed that rs2266879 was significantly associated with localization in both males and females and might be associated with working mermory and verbal cognitive ability. rs5987155 was significantly associated with inhibition only in males, but might be associated with spatial cognitive ability. Both rs6643791 and rs2266885 didn't show association with any cognitive abilities, but the rs6643791 might be associated with spatial cognitive ability in males. Unfortunately, three functional SNPs also did not show association with verbal cognitive ability in the healthy Han population compared with overseas research.The results of this study indicated that PLXNB3 gene selectively influences on human cognitive ability in Chinese Han population, but further study and discussion are needed to examine the preliminary findings.