The NIMH Brain Tissue Collection in the Clinical Brain Disorders Branch (NIMH, CBDB) obtained post-mortem human brains at autopsy primarily from the Offices of the Chief Medical Examiner of the District of Columbia, and of the Commonwealth of Virginia, Northern District, all with informed consent from the legal next of kin (protocol 90-M-0142 approved by the NIMH/NIH Institutional Review Board). Additional post-mortem fetal, infant, child and adolescent brain tissue samples were provided by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Brain and Tissue Bank for Developmental Disorders (http://www.BTBank.org) under contracts NO1-HD-4-3368 and NO1-HD-4-3383. The Institutional Review Board of the University of Maryland at Baltimore and the State of Maryland approved the protocol, and the tissue was donated to the NIMH under the terms of a Material Transfer Agreement. Clinical characterization, diagnoses, and macro- and microscopic neuropathological examinations were performed on all CBDB cases using a standardized paradigm. Details of tissue acquisition, handling, processing, dissection, clinical characterization, diagnoses, neuropathological examinations, RNA extraction and quality control measures were described previously23. The Brain and Tissue Bank cases were handled in a
