Novel associations between SNPs in the zinc finger protein 804A (ZNF804A) gene and heroin addiction (Sun et al., in press) have suggested that this gene may exert pleiotropic effects influencing multiple psychiatric-related phenotypes. ZNF804A was the first genome-wide significant finding reported for schizophrenia (O’Donovan et al., 2008), and since then, ZNF804A SNP associations have been widely implicated for schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders in populations of European and Asian ancestry (Cross-Disorder Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, 2013, International Schizophrenia Consortium et al., 2009, Riley et al., 2010, Schwab et al., 2013, Steinberg et al., 2011, Williams et al., 2011, Xiao et al., 2011). ZNF804A is abundantly expressed in human brain (Tao et al., 2014) and is predicted to encode a transcription factor that directly interacts with genes related to dopaminergic transmission (Girgenti et al., 2012), a neural mechanism known to drive both schizophrenia (Nieratschker et al., 2010) and addiction (Hyman et al., 2006). In extending ZNF804A SNP associations to heroin addiction, Sun et al. (in press) tested six ZNF804A SNPs in Han Chinese (N=3,922) and found that two of
