Mutations of schizophrenia risk gene SETD1A dysregulate synaptic function in human neurons

Abstract

Schizophrenia (SCZ) is a complex neuropsychiatric disorder associated with both common risk variants of small effect sizes and rare risk variants of high penetrance. Rare protein truncating variants (PTVs) in SETD1A (SET Domain Containing 1A) show a strong association with SCZ; however, it remains largely unclear how rare PTVs in SETD1A contribute to the pathophysiology of SCZ. To understand the impact of SETD1A rare PTVs in human neurons, we CRISPR/Cas9-engineered five isogenic pairs of human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), with a recurrent heterozygous patient-specific PTV mutation c.4582-2delAG in two donor lines and a heterozygous frameshift mutation c.4596_4597insG (p. Leu1533fs) in three donor lines. These two mutations are predicted to cause a premature stop codon in exon 16 of SETD1A, leading to the loss of the conserved SET domain that is critical for its histone methyltransferase activity. We found that these presumably loss-of-function (LoF) mutations caused the SETD1A mRNAs to be degraded by nonsense-mediated decay (NMD), accompanied by a reduction of full-length SETD1A protein level in iPSCs. We then characterized the morphological, electrophysiological, and transcriptomic impacts of the SETD1A+/- LoF mutations in iPSC-derived human excitatory neurons induced by NGN2. We found that the SETD1A+/- exon-16 LoF mutations altered dendrite complexity, dysregulated synaptic transmission, and synaptic plasticity, likely by dysregulating genes involved in synaptic function. These results provide mechanistic insights into how SETD1A+/-exon-16 patient-specific LoF mutations affect neuron phenotypes that may be relevant to the pathophysiology of SCZ.