Approved Research

Molecular signatures in psychiatric illnesses: Investigation of risk, and protective factors on genetic, epigenetic, and metabolic levels.

Lay summary

Up to 86 percent of people will experience some type of psychiatric illness during their life. Major psychiatric illnesses are typically viewed as having multiple causes, including environmental risk factors and genetic predisposition. While we know more about what contributes to people developing psychiatric illnesses, less is known about what genetic and environmental factors protect us from developing them. Lately, genetic resilience has been proposed to reduce the penetrance of risk-associated genetic loci, where risk and protection alleles operate conditionally independent of each other.

The first part of our project aims to identify molecular signatures of resilience and examine their relationship considering the resilience versus mental disorder balance. We hypothesize that there is a genetic signature for resilience and that the polygenic score for resilience will be negatively correlated with the polygenic risk score for mental disorders.

The second part of the project aims to identify molecular signatures associated with resilience to a mental disorder. We hypothesize that the polygenic resilience score will be associated with metabolomic signatures, such as bioenergetics, hub molecules and metabolites.

Our study could give a contribution to our understanding of mental disorders and lead to the prevention and treatment of disease.

The project is expected to last for 36 months.