For human postmortem studies, the tissue was obtained from Brodmann's area 8 in the left hemisphere from 95 subjects with schizophrenia and 93 age- and sex-matched controls. The tissue was obtained from the Victorian Brain Bank Network (The Florey Institute for Neuroscience and Mental Health, Parkville, VIC, Australia, http://www.florey.edu.au/research/brain-bank-network). The tissue was collected after obtaining permission from the Ethics Committee of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine. Total RNA was extracted using the miRNAeasy Mini kit (Qiagen), and we used the samples whose RIN was ⩾7.0. The demographic data of those 51 samples from schizophrenia and 70 from controls are described in Supplementary Table S1. Single-stranded cDNA was synthesized using SuperScript VILO Master Mix (Invitrogen). Quantitative RT-PCR analysis was conducted as stated above. TaqMan probes and primers for MAPK14, GFAP, MAP2, IL1B, IL6 and GAPDH (internal control; see ref. 25) were chosen from TaqMan Gene Expression Assays (Life Technologies). All real-time quantitative RT-PCR reactions were performed in triplicate, based on the standard curve method. The expression ratio of GFAP/MAP2 in each postmortem brain sample was calculated as (GFAP/GAPDH)/(MAP2/GAPDH).
