A Study On The Association Between The Polymorphisms In NRSF And SNAP-25 And Human Brain Cognitive Ability

Cognitive ability is a basic capability of human to adapt and modify the environment formed in the course of human evolution, associating with the ability of human brain to process, storage and retrieve information. Human cognitive ability is affected by multi-gene. Studies have shown that the heritability of human cognitive abilities is 40%-80%. Therefore, it is very important to explore the relationship between genes and cognitive ability and to find genes that affect cognitive abilities through studying the relationship of polymorphism and cognitive ability.Neural-Restrictive Silencer Factor (NRSF) attracted many neurobiologists'attention both at home and abroad, due to its regulating many neural-specific genes'express in the nervous system. So far, reports about NRSF gene has been concentrating on its regulatory mechanism of gene express in nervous system. Recent studies showed that NRSF was correlated with the human cognitive ability, and forthermore NRSF had a combined effect on human cognitive ability with genes which were regulated by it. Synaptosomal-Associated Protein gene is one of the genes regulated by NRSF, which was proved to be associated with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, schizophrenia and epilepsy. Until now, although we can find the articles about the relationship between NRSF, SNAP-25 and human cognitive abilities, the relative reports are all about the European population. Neither the association between NRSF and SNAP-25 gene polymorphisms and cognitive ability in healthy Chinese Han population, nor the association between combined effect of NRSF and SNAP-25 gene and cognitive ability in human cognitive ability has been reported.In order to study the relationship between NRSF and SNAP-25 gene polymorphism and cognitive ability in young healthy Chinese Han population, VNTR and rs2228991 polymorphic locus in NRSF gene, rs362584 and rs3746544 polymorphic locus in SNAP-25 gene were selected. Single locus analysis showed that VNTR of NRSF was significantly associated with react time of reading working memory (p=0.01) and digital recognition of long-term memory (p=0.01), and SNAP-25 was significantly associated with phonological fluency(p=0.02) and react time of sentence-charting matching (p=0.02). Combined analysis indicated that NRSF* SNAP-25 was significantly associated with react time of digital working memory, digital recognition of long-term memory, phonological fluency and react time of sentence-charting matching.The above results revealed a positive association between the genetic variants of NRSF and SNAP-25 and cognitive ability in the young healthy Chinese Han population, and NRSF and SNAP-25 had a combine effect on the cognitive ability of young healthy Chinese Han population. However, this preliminary conclusion still needs further research and discussion.