To assess the collective expression of MVP-EXT related genes in those that died by suicide vs those who died by other causes, we applied the single-cell Disease-Relevance Scoring (scDRS)40 method. Each potential candidate gene was weighted by its MAGMA41 Z-score and adjusted for gene-specific technical noise in single-cell data obtained from an extensive postmortem dataset, consisting of 450K cells from the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) of 40 human donors from the VA’s National PTSD Brain Bank (NPBB)42. This sample consisted of 16 “control” individuals (non-suicides related death) and 24 “cases” (confirmed suicide deaths, 12 with post-traumatic stress disorder and 12 with major depressive disorder), described in detail elsewhere43. The scDRS approach produced cell-specific raw disease scores. We generated 1,000 sets of cell-specific raw control scores using matched control gene sets, ensuring consistency in gene set size, mean expression, and expression variance with the candidate genes. Next, we normalized both the raw disease (e.g., suicide) and control scores for each cell, resulting in normalized disease and control scores. We evaluated cell type-level associations to identify broad cell types linked to the
