Dysregulated neurodevelopment with altered structural and functional connectivity is believed to underlie many neuropsychiatric disorders1, and ‘a disease of synapses’ is the major hypothesis for the biological basis of schizophrenia2. Although this hypothesis has gained indirect support from human post-mortem brain analyses2–4 and genetic studies5–10, little is known about the pathophysiology of synapses in patient neurons and how susceptibility genes for mental disorders could lead to synaptic deficits in humans. Genetics of most psychiatric disorders are extremely complex due to multiple susceptibility variants with low penetrance and variable phenotypes11. Rare, multiply affected, large families in which a single genetic locus is probably responsible for conferring susceptibility have proven invaluable for the study of complex disorders. Here we generated induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells from four members of a family in which a frameshift mutation of disrupted in schizophrenia 1 (DISC1) co-segregated with major psychiatric disorders12 and we further produced different isogenic iPS cell lines via gene editing. We showed that mutant DISC1 causes synaptic vesicle release deficits in iPS-cell-derived forebrain neurons. Mutant DISC1 depletes wild-type DISC1 protein and, furthermore, dysregulates expression of many genes related to synapses and psychiatric disorders in human forebrain neurons. Our study reveals that a psychiatric disorder relevant mutation causes synapse deficits and transcriptional dysregulation in human neurons and our findings provide new insight into the molecular and synaptic etiopathology of psychiatric disorders.

SUMMARY We report here homologous recombination (HR)-mediated gene targeting of two different genes in human iPS and ES cells. HR-mediated correction of a chromosomally-integrated mutant GFP reporter gene reaches efficiencies of 0.14%-0.24% in both cell types transfected by donor DNA with plasmids expressing zinc-finger nucleases (ZFNs). Engineered ZFNs that induce a sequence-specific double-strand-break in the GFP gene enhanced HR-mediated correction by >1400-fold without detectable alterations in stem cell karyotypes or pluripotency. Efficient HR-mediated insertional mutagenesis was also achieved at the endogenous PIG-A locus, with a >200-fold enhancement by ZFNs targeted to that gene. Clonal PIG-A null human ES and iPS cells with normal karyotypes were readily obtained. The phenotypic and biological defects were rescued by PIG-A transgene expression. Our study provides the first demonstration of HR-mediated gene targeting in human iPS cells, and the power of ZFNs for inducing specific genetic modifications in human iPS as well as ES cells.

A key finding of the ENCODE project is that the enhancer landscape of mammalian cells undergoes marked alterations during ontogeny. However, the nature and extent of these changes are unclear. As part of the NIH Mouse Regulome Project, we here combined DNaseI hypersensitivity, ChIP-Seq, and ChIA-PET technologies to map the promoter-enhancer interactomes of pluripotent ES cells and differentiated B lymphocytes. We confirm that enhancer usage varies widely across tissues. Unexpectedly, we find that this feature extends to broadly-transcribed genes, including Myc and Pim1 cell cycle regulators, which associate with an entirely different set of enhancers in ES and B cells. By means of high-resolution CpG methylomes, genome editing, and digital footprinting we show that these enhancers recruit lineage-determining factors. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the turning on and off of enhancers during development correlates with promoter activity. We propose that organisms rely on a dynamic enhancer landscape to control basic cellular functions in a tissue-specific manner.