Fabian Streit, Ph.D.
BBRF Grantee: 2023 – 2025
Central Institute of Mental Health, Mannheim, Germany
Dr. Streit, having formed and led the International Borderline Genomics Consortium and identified risk variants and genes associated with borderline personality disorder (BPD) using genome-wide association studies, now will extend this work by studying epigenome-wide epigenetic and transcriptome-wide gene expression profiles associated with BPD directly in the brain. Environmental effects are often transmitted via epigenetic DNA modifications; such alterations will be explored in postmortem brain tissue of 45 BPD patients and 45 matched controls. The team will use the data to identify DNA positions and regions differentially methylated or expressed in BPD patients, indicating the involvement of specific genes in the disorder, and will apply pathway and network analyses to identify which functional groups of genes are associated with BPD. They also aim to identify genes or pathways with convergent
evidence from methylation, gene expression, and the most recent BPD-GWAS, currently under way in over 6,000 BPD patients. This project will be the first to examine DNA methylation and gene expression in brain tissue from BPD patients.
