Background: Bipolar disorder (BD) is a common psychiatric disorder with complex genetic architecture. It shares overlapping genetic influences with schizophrenia (SZ) and major depressive disorder (MDD). Large numbers of genetic studies of BD and cross-disorder studies between BD and SZ/MDD have accumulated numerous genetic data. There is a growing need to integrate the data to provide a comprehensive data set to facilitate the genetic study of BD and its highly relevant diseases.
Methods: BDgene database was developed to integrate BD-related genetic factors and shared ones with SZ/MDD from profound literature reading. On the basis of data from the literature, in-depth analyses were performed for further understanding of the data, including gene prioritization, pathway-based analysis, intersection analysis of multidisease candidate genes, and pathway enrichment analysis.
Results: BDgene includes multiple types of literature-reported genetic factors of BD with both positive and negative results, including 797 genes, 3119 single nucleotide polymorphisms, and 789 regions. Shared genetic factors such as single nucleotide polymorphisms, genes, and regions from published cross-disorder studies among BD and SZ/MDD were also presented. In-depth data analyses identified 43 BD core genes; 70 BD candidate pathways; and 127, 79, and 107 new potential cross-disorder genes for BD-SZ, BD-MDD, and BD-SZ-MDD, respectively.
Conclusions: As a central genetic database for BD and the first cross-disorder database for BD and SZ/MDD, BDgene provides not only a comprehensive review of current genetic research but also high-confidence candidate genes and pathways for understanding of BD mechanism and shared etiology among its relevant diseases. BDgene is freely available at http://bdgene.psych.ac.cn.
Keywords: BDgene; bipolar disorder; data analysis; genetic database; genetic overlap; major depressive disorder; schizophrenia.
© 2013 Society of Biological Psychiatry.