The present study is also the largest of its kind to date to use whole genome sequencing to fine-map the 108 loci identified by the PGC genome-wide association study (GWAS) meta-analysis of schizophrenia. Our one significant gene-based association was with SBNO1, a gene that is highly conserved across species and has a function in regulating development (Egan et al. 1998), but no obvious biological link to neurobehavioral abnormalities relevant to affective modulated startle. In addition, this particular startle measure is perhaps the least strong endophenotype studied here (heritability = 0.01), casting further doubt on the utility of this finding. The lack of additional findings suggests that there are no rare or low-frequency variants of large effect on any of these 17 endophenotypes within the 108 PGC loci. This finding is perhaps not surprising given difficulties in finding rare variant associations with schizophrenia from other, larger exome sequencing studies (Purcell et al. 2014; Singh et al. 2016).
