A promising strategy to facilitate identification of genes underlying smoking behavior is genome-wide association studies (GWAS) that take advantage of the knowledge of linkage equilibrium (LD) patterns in humans and the rapid development of high throughput SNP genotyping platforms. With high SNP densities that facilitate detection of culprit DNA changes within a narrow genomic region, the GWAS approach has demonstrated its great power for identifying novel genes associated with human complex diseases/traits (10-14).
