Dr. Hyejung Won (Associate Professor, Department of Genetics and UNC Neuroscience Center) was awarded a new R01 grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) for her project titled “Interplay between common and rare variants associated with schizophrenia”.
Dr. Won plans to use a human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC)-based experimental paradigm to investigate the interplay between common and rare variants across the two neuronal cell types predominantly implicated in schizophrenia: glutamatergic and GABAergic neurons. Her team proposes the following aims: 1) to investigate the molecular and cellular impacts of high-penetrant schizophrenia risk gene perturbations; 2) to empirically evaluate the functional impact of non-coding common variants associated with schizophrenia to uncover their regulatory logic and pinpoint causal variants; and 3) to establish the extent to which the regulatory logic of common variants is impacted by high-penetrant schizophrenia risk gene perturbations, investigating the impact of rare variants on the regulatory activity of common variants.