No evidence for rare recessive and compound heterozygous disruptive variants in schizophrenia

Recessive inheritance of gene disrupting alleles, either through homozygosity at a specific site or compound heterozygosity, have been demonstrated to underlie many Mendelian diseases and some complex psychiatric disorders. On the basis of exome sequencing data, an increased burden of complete knockout (homozygous or compound heterozygous) variants has been identified in autism. In addition, using single-nucleotide polymorphism microarray data, an increased rate of homozygosity by descent, or autozygosity, has been linked to the risk of schizophrenia (SCZ). Here, in a large Swedish case-control SCZ sample (11 244 individuals, 5079 of whom have exome sequence data available), we survey the contribution of both autozygosity and complete knockouts to disease risk. We do not find evidence for association with SCZ, either genome wide or at specific loci. However, we note the possible impact of sample size and population genetic factors on the power to detect and quantify any burden that may exist.