The NeuroBioBank whole-genome catalogue of human brain donors with central nervous system disorders

CNS diseases are a prevailing cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, and are influenced by environmental and biological factors, including genetic risk. Here, we generated genome-wide genetic data on a large cohort of brain tissue donors with in-depth clinical and neuropathological phenotyping, allowing for broad investigations into the risk and mechanisms of these neurological, neurodevelopmental and psychiatric conditions. This resource consists of 9663 donors with array-based genotyping and 9543 donors with whole-genome sequencing completed. The clinical diagnoses of these donors include 148 CNS diseases clustered into 15 broad categories by International Classification of Diseases-10 (ICD-10) coding. These donors were collected by six repositories comprising the National Institutes of Health NeuroBioBank, with an average participant age of 60 years. While primarily older individuals of European descent, the cohort also contains younger donors and individuals from non-European backgrounds. Variants were detected in whole-genome sequencing, normalized and annotated to describe their functional impact, resulting in 171 121 209 unique variants and 1 078 774 non-silent variants. These raw and normalized data have been made available as a neurogenomics resource in the National Institute of Mental Health Data Archive (nda.nih.gov), combined with donor-matched deep demographic and phenotypic data from the NeuroBioBank Portal (neurobiobank.nih.gov). To illustrate applications, we replicated the strong association observed in previous studies between pathogenic CAG nucleotide repeat expansions in the HTT gene with the clinical diagnosis of Huntington’s disease, as well as associations of the APOE gene with Alzheimer’s disease, and examined the association of polygenic risk scores with the three most common disease diagnoses in the cohort.