Schizophrenia is a complex mental disorder with high heritability. Multiple genes were discovered to be associated with it, among which the cardiomyopathy associated 5 gene (CMYA5) has recently been identified to be a novel risk gene leading to schizophrenia in European and African American populations. However, it remained unknown whether the research result could be applied to Chinese populations.

In order to unravel the misery, the Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Virginia Commonwealth University co-conducted a systematic genetic analysis of 5605 Chinese people diagnosed with schizophrenia, including 1901 southern Han Chinese samples and 3704 northern Han Chinese samples. 

Through genotyping of candidate SNPs “rs3828611 and rs4704591”, it was observed that rs3828611 bore significant associations in southern Han Chinese samples, though the association did not reach significance in the Beijing samples due to the allele frequency difference. And rs4704591 was not significant in any of the Han Chinese samples, but showed a significant association in European populations, implying potential genetic heterogeneity of CMYA5 sequence variations in schizophrenia susceptibility among continental populations. Though different in detail, CMYA5 also proves to be schizophrenia-related gene in Chinese populations. The research results have been published in Schizophrenia Research(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0920996411000053).