We have found that in order to achieve comprehensive tagged coverage of genes that are biologically relevant to addiction in the African, Chinese, European-American and Japanese populations, all the commercial SNP microarrays we considered require significant supplementation. The approaches used here will aid other investigators to supplement these arrays, to target specific genomic regions such as genes and linkage regions, and also improve the general selection of SNPs for genetic studies of addiction based on the “biological role in addiction” criterion. The development of a database of addiction related genes is similar to existing methods and resources in the literature [15]–[17], the primary difference being our development of a SNP database and a prioritization algorithm that allows the systematic supplementation of commercial SNP microarrays.
