Understanding the Pathology of Schizophrenia: The Impact of High-Throughput Screening of the Genome and Proteome in Postmortem CNS

High-throughput screening technologies such as microarrays and 2D electrophoresis are powerful analytical tools particularly suited to investigating the pathologies of complex diseases. Schizophrenia is now widely recognised as a complex disorder resulting from the interplay between genetic predisposition to the illness and the effects of yet to be identified environmental factors. Based the hypothesis that the outcome of the interaction between genetic predisposition and environmental factors act to produce changes in protein expression in the CNS to cause schizophrenia, a number of studies have used postmortem CNS and high throughput screening technologies to identify potential pathological processes that might be involved in the pathology of the disorder. This review attempts to place the current findings on gene and protein expression data in postmortem CNS from subjects with schizophrenia into a perspective that allows hypotheses on the cause of the disorder to be formulated.