Integrative Genomic Enrichment Analysis Identified the Brain Regions and Development Stages Related to Anorexia Nervosa and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Abstract

Our aim is to explore the spatial and temporal features of anorexia nervosa (AN) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) considering different brain regions and development stages. The gene sets related to 16 brain regions and nine development stages were obtained from a brain spatial and temporal transcriptomic dataset. Using the genome-wide association study data, transcriptome-wide association study (TWAS) was conducted to identify the genes whose imputed expressions were associated with AN and OCD, respectively. The mRNA expression profiles were analyzed by GEO2R to obtain differentially expressed genes. Gene set enrichment analysis was conducted to detect the spatial and temporal features related to AN and OCD using the TWAS and mRNA expression analysis results. We observed multiple common association signals shared by TWAS and mRNA expression analysis of AN, such as the primary auditory cortex vs. cerebellar cortex in fetal development and earlier vs. later fetal development in the somatosensory cortex. For OCD, we also detected multiple common association signals, such as medial prefrontal cortex vs. amygdala in adulthood and fetal development vs. infancy in mediodorsal nucleus of thalamus. Our study provides novel clues for describing the spatial and temporal features of brain development in the pathogenesis of AN and OCD.

Keywords: anorexia nervosa; brain spatial feature; brain temporal feature; gene sets enrichment analysis; obsessive-compulsive disorder.