There is a great need for identifying genes/variants specifically related to AA drinking behavior and problems (Zemore et al., 2018). The identification of population specific genes/variants can advance our knowledge of the etiology of alcohol dependence in AA and contribute to the development of novel prevention and therapeutic strategies. However, there are several methodological challenges specific to conducting genetic studies in AA. First, there are fewer and smaller studies of AA compared to EA. Of the 32 GWAS of alcohol dependence and related phenotypes in the NHGRI-EBI GWAS catalog (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/gwas/home), only 11 include AA and sample sizes are much smaller compared to other populations. Recently, in the largest GWAS of alcohol dependence, only 6,280 AA were included in an analysis of >52,000 individuals (Walters et al., 2018). In another recent GWAS using the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) in the Million Veteran Project (MVP), there were about 57,000 AA samples, however, the EA population consisted of > 209,000 participants (Kranzler et al., 2019). Second, people of African ancestry have more genetic variants and a faster decay of linkage disequilibrium
