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Chunk #14 — Opportunities and Challenges

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Commentary for Special Issue of Prevention Science "Using Genetics in Prevention: Science Fiction or Science Fact?".
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such as aggression, conduct problems, depressive affect, or anxiety, there has been far less progress in gene identification, and GPSs that account for significant portions of the variance are not yet available (Dick et al., 2004; Hettema, Neale, & Kendler, 2001; Pappa et al., 2016; Ripke et al., 2013). These disorders are less heritable, and accordingly, larger numbers of individuals must be amassed for gene identification in order to create GPSs that account for nontrivial amounts of variance. However, analyses by the Social Science Genetics Association Consortium (SSGAC) demonstrate that these obstacles can be overcome with sufficiently large samples. For example, the most recent analyses of educational attainment, a phenotype with a heritability of only ~20%, consisted of 293,723 individuals and identified 74 genome-wide significant loci, that replicated in an independent sample and showed enrichment for biologically relevant variants (Okbay et al., 2016). Further, new methods are also advancing gene identification efforts by facilitating the ease of combining information from multiple studies, with related, but distinct, phenotypes (Turley et al., 2017). Accordingly, it is only a matter of time before the complex behavioral outcomes of interest to prevention scientists are likely to advance further in terms of gene identification, and