COMT and schizophrenia: LRTOMT appears to have evolved from the fusion of two neighboring ancestral genes LRRC51 and TOMT. The former gene has no known function, while the latter is a homolog of COMT, which encodes a catechol-O-methyltransferase implicated in the etiology of schizophrenia (Männistö and Kaakkola, 1999; Tunbridge, 2010).