Moreover, these thousands of independent loci appear to account for a considerable fraction of the heritability of schizophrenia. It is possible that the commonly used phrase “missing heritability” lacks precision. Indeed, if thousands of SNPs underlie schizophrenia, a statistical models containing a handful of SNPs is unlikely to account for more than a small fraction of the heritability. 70 Ourresults imply that the genetic architecture of schizophrenia is not dominated by uncommon variation. However, a balanced plan of attack should include well-powered searches for rare, private, or de novo genetic variation of strong effect given that such variants are probably more tractable to current molecular methods.
