Scientists at UCLA have solved a mystery posed by an earlier study conducted on the genetic basis of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness that affects millions of people around the world with no lasting cure. A 2014 study determined that 108 loci mutations were were correlated with schizophrenia, but they were located in regulatory regions far from any genes involving the brain. In this 2016 study, it was determined through chromosome conformation capture that these loci are in fact physically close to genes involving fetal cerebral cortex development when the chromosomes are tightly packed, despite being many base pairs away. This process has demonstrated that schizophrenia, although classified as an adult-onset disease, has important fetal components.
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