Increased levels of expression of an NMDAR1 splice variant in the superior temporal gyrus in schizophrenia

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Abstract
Expression patterns of mRNAs for the NMDAR1 subunit (NR1) carboxy-terminus isoforms were investigated in postmortem brain tissue using isotopic in situ hybridization. Three brain regions (superior temporal, middle frontal and visual cortices) were examined in patients with schizophrenia (n = 6) and control subjects (n = 6). A 22% higher level of expression of the NR1 isoform that contains neither spliced exon was observed in the superior temporal gyrus of patients with schizophrenia compared with controls (p = 0.01). No differences were observed in the expression of the other isoforms in the three regions studied. These data suggest that NR1 alternative splicing might be abnormal in schizophrenia and reinforce previous findings implicating the superior temporal gyrus as a site of neural dysfunction in schizophrenia.