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Background

Hippocampal neurogenesis is thought to play a key role in several psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia. Since no causative locus has been found to date, the identification of gene networks related to both hippocampus neurogenesis and psychiatric disorders may provide important cues to the understanding of these disorders.

Methods

We downloaded RNA-seq or microarray data of human post-mortem hippocampus and used the R package Weighted Correlation Network Analysis (WGCNA) to identify target gene co-expression modules. Finally, we used a hypergeometric method to test the overlap between the identified gene modules and risk genes previously identified by whole exome sequencing in schizophrenia patients.

Results

We found 10 conserved gene co-expression modules across the three datasets. One of the modules (consisting of 900 genes) had significant differential …