Alcoholism is known to be moderately heritable yet the search for genetic vulnerability factors has proven to be more difficult than originally thought and to date only a small proportion of the genetic variance has been accounted for. Over the past decade there have been tremendous advances in large scale SNP genotyping technologies and next generation sequencing and these technologies, including GWAS arrays and whole genome sequencing, are now widely available. Results of GWAS suggest that numerous common variants with very small effect and potentially rare variants with large effects are likely to encode proteins within, or regulate, numerous biological pathways. The current hope is that with very large sample sizes, GWAS will provide novel information about genetic underpinnings of alcoholism, including gene pathways that are altered in disease.
