which were mostly not detected through other diagnosis based discovery approaches. For alcohol dependence, only one GWAS using pooled DNA samples has been published to date, and it has proposed several new susceptibility loci for alcohol dependence. Their products are implicated in cellular signalling, gene regulation, development and cell adhesion.25 Convergent translational approaches integrate genetic findings from animal models with a candidate gene or GWAS approach in humans and have proven to be very successful.26,27 The goal of the present study was to conduct a GWAS and follow-up study for alcohol dependence using individual genotyping in samples stratified for homogeneity with respect to sex, ethnicity, age at onset, and recruitment procedures. In order to increase the explanatory power of our findings, we applied a Convergent Functional Genomics28 approach to integrate findings from gene expression data in alcohol dependent rats with our GWAS findings.
