Schizophrenia is a severe psychiatric disease that has lifetime prevalence of 1% in most the populations studied. The neuropathology and psychopathology are still poorly understood. This attributed to paucity adequate animal models. disorder human brain. Consequently, potency models research limited certain aspects disease. One difficult modelling animals been lack clear explicit conceptual fra...

Neuregulin 1 (NRG1) and the γ-secretase subunit APH1B have been previously implicated as genetic risk factors for schizophrenia and schizophrenia relevant deficits have been observed in rodent models with loss of function mutations in either gene. Here we show that the Aph1b-γ-secretase is selectively involved in Nrg1 intracellular signalling. We found that Aph1b-deficient mice display a decrea...

Accumulating evidence suggests that neuregulin 1 (NRG1) might be involved in the neurodevelopment, neural plasticity, GABAergic neurotransmission, and pathogenesis of schizophrenia. NRG1 is abundantly expressed in the hippocampus, and emerging studies have begun to reveal the link between NRG1 signaling and cognitive deficits in schizophrenic patients. Because the transmembrane domain of NRG1 i...

Schizophrenia is characterized by positive and negative symptoms and cognitive dysfunction. The glutamate hypothesis of schizophrenia has been hypothesized to explain the negative symptoms and cognitive deficits better than the dopamine hypothesis alone. Therefore, we aimed to evaluate whether glutamatergic variants such as d-amino acid oxidase (DAO), DAO activator (DAOA)/G72, and neuregulin 1 ...

Deficits in neurite outgrowth, possibly involving dysregulation of risk genes neuregulin-1 (NRG1) and disrupted in schizophrenia 1 (DISC1) have been implicated in psychiatric disorders including schizophrenia. Electrical stimulation using conductive polymers has been shown to stimulate neurite outgrowth of differentiating human neural stem cells. This study investigated the use of the electroac...

genetic epidemiological studies strongly suggest that additive and interactive genes, each with small effects, mediate the genetic vulnerability for schizophrenia. with the human genome working draft at hand, candidate gene (and ultimately large-scale genome-wide) association studies are gaining renewed interest in the effort to unravel the complex genetics of schizophrenia. linkage and fine ma...

Schizophrenia is a multi-factorial disease characterized by a high heritability and environmental risk factors. In recent years, an increasing number of researchers worldwide have started investigating the "two-hit hypothesis" of schizophrenia predicting that genetic and environmental risk factors (GxE) interactively cause the development of the disorder. This work is starting to produce valuab...

Background: Evidence of genetic association between the NRG1 (Neuregulin-1) gene and schizophrenia is now well-documented. Furthermore, several recent reports suggest association between schizophrenia and singlenucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in ERBB4, one of the receptors for Neuregulin-1. In this study, we have extended the previously published associations by investigating the involvement of...

Neuregulin 1 (Nrg1) has been widely recognized as a candidate gene for schizophrenia. This study therefore investigated mice heterozygous for a mutation in the transmembrane domain of this trophic factor (Nrg1+/- mice) in a number of behavioural test systems with relevance to schizophrenia, including psychotropic drug-induced locomotor hyperactivity and prepulse inhibition (PPI) of startle. Bas...

D ata from twin, family, and adoption studies provide strong evidence that genetic factors play a major aetiological role in schizophrenia. By a series of linkage studies, chromosome 8p has been implicated as a region harbouring a schizophrenia susceptibility gene. Recently, Stefansson and colleagues reported that neuregulin 1 (NRG1), located in 8p21-12, may be involved in the aetiology of schi...