Gene Expression Analysis of Fibroblasts from Patients with Bipolar Disorder

Bipolar disorder is a severe, lifelong psychiatric disease. The main underlying pathophysiology of the disease is still incomprehensible. Various studies have suggested that many genes of small impact in combination with environmental factors contribute to the expression of the disease. In this study comparative transcriptomic profiling to characterize skin fibroblasts’ gene expression of bipolar disorder patients compared to healthy controls has been performed. Skin fibroblast cells from bipolar disorder patients (n=10) and marched healthy controls (n=5) have been cultured. RNA was extracted and then hybridized onto Illumina Human HT-12 v4 Expression BeadChips. Differentially expressed genes between bipolar disorder samples and healthy controls were identified by performing unequal t-test on log 2 transformed expression values. The resulting gene list was obtained by setting the p-value threshold to 0.05 and by removing genes that presented a fold change ≥ |0.5| (in log 2 scale). We concluded to 457 differentially expressed genes. Among them 127 showed an upregulation and 330 were downregulated. Τhe expression alterations of selected genes were validated by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction. In order to derive better insight into the biological mechanisms related to the differentially expressed genes, the lists of significant genes were subjected to pathway analysis and target prioritization indicating various processes such as calcium ion homeostasis, positive regulation of apoptotic process and cellular response to retinoic acid.