ABSTRACT
The adoption of Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) as the gold standard of gene-identification led to a significant reorganization of the field; from small-scale studies of family pedigrees to the international consortia required to conduct and manage large-scale population studies. The first GWAS results in psychiatric genetics were published in 2007. By 2008, signs began to appear that not only psychiatric GWAS, but GWAS in general, were failing to deliver findings equal to their investment and scale. The expression ‘missing heritability’ highlighted the disparity between heritability estimates and the combined genetic variance identified by GWAS results. Consortium-based GWAS had been relatively successful in powering studies that were beginning to generate meaningful. One of the reasons why the ‘genetic architecture’ metaphor is so alluring for the field is because GWAS have acquired the stability to identify regions of biological interest and, in the process, have implicated previously unknown biochemical pathways in disease causation.
