BACKGROUND A putative interaction between cannabis and variation at rs4680 within the catechol-methyl-transferase (COMT) gene on psychosis has been reported, but not adequately replicated. AIMS To examine whether the relative risk of developing psychosis following use of cannabis is dependent upon variation within COMT. METHOD A longitudinal study of 2630 individuals from the Avon Longitudi...

BACKGROUND Personality traits such as novelty seeking (NS) are associated with substance dependence but the mechanism underlying this association remains uncertain. Previous studies have focused on the role of the dopamine pathway. OBJECTIVE Examine the relationships between allelic variants of the catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) gene, NS personality traits, and age of onset of drug use i...

Cytochrome P450 1B1 (CYP1B1) and catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) are important estrogen-metabolizing enzymes that may affect breast cancer risk. Few studies have directly measured the expression of CYP1B1 and COMT genes in breast tissue samples. The subjects in this study were a subgroup of participants of the Shanghai Breast Cancer Study including 64 patients diagnosed with breast cancer a...

Twin studies have indicated a common genetic origin for intelligence and for variations in brain morphology. Our previous diffusion tensor imaging studies found an association between intelligence and white matter integrity of specific brain regions or tracts. However, specific genetic determinants of the white matter integrity of these brain regions and tracts are still unclear. In this study,...

Preeclampsia (PE) and fetal growth restriction (FGR) are serious complications of pregnancy, associated with greatly increased risk of maternal and perinatal morbidity and mortality. These complications are difficult to diagnose and no curative treatments are available. We hypothesized that the metabolomic signature of two models of disease, catechol-O-methyl transferase (COMT(-/-)) and endothe...

INTRODUCTION Smoking behaviors, including heaviness of smoking and smoking cessation, are known to be under a degree of genetic influence. The enzyme catechol O-methyltransferase (COMT) is of relevance in studies of smoking behavior and smoking cessation due to its presence in dopaminergic brain regions. While the COMT gene is therefore one of the more promising candidate genes for smoking beha...

INTRODUCTION Preterm birth is associated with a range of neurodevelopmental deficits, including corpus callosum (CC) abnormalities, which persist into late adolescence and early adulthood. A common single-nucleotide polymorphism in the catechol-o-methyl transferase (COMT) gene (Val158Met) is associated with cognition and brain structure and may play a role in neurodevelopment. It is not known w...

Problem statement: We have previously cloned a gene of Chinese white shrimp Catechol O-Methyltransferase (designated Fc-COMT) and characterized the gene expression pattern. In this study, expression and purification as well as activity assay of the recombinant Fc-COMT was further conducted. Approach: Using pET-30a (+) as a prokaryotic expression vector, the recombinant FcCOMT was expressed in t...

Inhibition of specific lignin biosynthetic steps by antisense strategy has previously been shown to alter lignin content and/or structure. In this work, homozygous tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) lines transformed with cinnamoyl-coenzyme A reductase (CCR) or caffeic acid/5-hydroxy ferulic acid-O-methyltransferase I (COMT I) antisense sequences have been crossed and enzyme activities, lignin synthes...

linkage studies and epidemiological findings indicate that some possible genes in schizophrenia (scz) and bipolar mood disorder (bpd) are common. numerous evidences for linkage of two diseases on chromosome 22 have been found. these findings suggest that one or more genes in the 22q11.21 region may be involved in the development of both disorders. in the present case-control study, association ...