We have entered a period of unprecedented gene discovery, made possible by advances in genotyping technology, coupled with greater knowledge of genetic variation, and rapidly falling genotyping costs. Now we can comprehensively scan the human genome, testing variation across millions of markers, to identify specific variants associated with any outcome of interest. Because scanning millions of genetic markers requires massive multiple testing correction, it became clear that huge samples sizes would be necessary to conduct well-powered studies. Researchers came together and formed consortia, pooling their samples to achieve huge sample sizes. One of the most prominent examples of these international collaborative consortia is the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, which consists of over 800 investigators from >40 countries (Watson et al., 2020). Other large-scale consortia have focused on behavioral outcomes such as alcohol and tobacco use (Liu et al., 2019), and educational attainment (Lee et al., 2018). Several countries and medical systems formed biobanks to collate health information and genotyping for hundreds of thousands of individuals, creating rich resources made broadly available to the field (Bycroft et al., 2018).
