Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a complex syndrome that occurs following exposure to a
potentially life threatening traumatic event. Etiology and pathogenesis of PTSD research has
largely focused on two main factors: genetic vulnerability and environment triggers. The
estimated heritability of PTSD from twin studies is at 0.3–0.4. Studies aiming to explore
genetic susceptibility and environmental triggers of PTSD have been increasing in recent
years. A comprehensive summary for the genetic studies of PTSD as well as gene-environment
interaction studies is necessary to understand the current genetic study status and explore
more reliable candidates. Here, we present PTSDgene, a genetic database for PTSD, to fulfill
the growing needs of data integration and data analysis. There has been no such effort for PTSD.
As the first genetic database for PTSD, PTSDgene aims to integrate multi-type genetic factors of
PTSD from published genetic studies. The genetic factors not only include variants (e.g. SNPs,
haplotype and other variants), genes but also gene-environment interactions. Further functional
annotation and data analyses, including linkage disequilibrium analysis for SNPs, functional and
regulatory annotation for SNPs, SNPs related expression Quantitative Trait Loci (eQTL) annotation,
gene related pathways and interacted genes annotation, pathway enrichment and protein-protein interaction
analysis for PTSD significant genes, were performed. All the results were presented in PTSDgene.
Powerful search tools were developed to facilitate the navigation of the data and data connections.
We hope PTSDgene could be a platform for the rapid growth of PTSD genetic data and provide
new insights into pathogenesis of PTSD.
PTSDgene will be updated periodically to maintain an up-date-to-date resource using our established
data update pipeline. We welcome your comments and suggestions on PTSDgene.
