A genome-wide association study in 574 schizophrenia trios using DNA pooling

The cost of genome-wide association (GWA) studies can be prohibitively high when large samples are genotyped. We conducted a GWA study on schizophrenia (SZ) and to reduce the cost, we used DNA pooling. We used a parent-offspring trios design to avoid the potential problems of population stratification. We constructed pools from 605 unaffected controls, 574 SZ patients and a third pool from all the parents of the patients. We hybridized each pool eight times on Illumina HumanHap550 arrays. We estimated the allele frequencies of each pool from the averaged intensities of the arrays. The significance level of results in the trios sample was estimated on the basis of the allele frequencies in cases and non-transmitted pseudocontrols, taking into account the technical variability of the data. We selected the highest ranked SNPs for individual genotyping, after excluding poorly performing SNPs and those that showed a trend in the opposite direction in the control pool. We genotyped 63 SNPs in 574 trios and analysed the results with the transmission disequilibrium test. Forty of those were significant at P < 0.05, with the best result at P = 1.2 x 10(-6) for rs11064768. This SNP is within the gene CCDC60, a coiled-coil domain gene. The third best SNP (P = 0.00016) is rs893703, within RBP1, a candidate gene for schizophrenia. Molecular Psychiatry (2009) 14, 796-803; doi:10.1038/mp.2008.33; published online 11 March 2008