There has been a recent explosion in the amount of genomic information now available for common complex diseases including AUD. This is primarily due to the advent of the genome-wide association study (GWAS). However, how new genomic information afforded by GWAS of alcohol dependence as well as information from other gene identification approaches fits within the addiction cycle has not been explored. In this paper, we review a selected series of “first-generation” GWAS of alcohol dependence after briefly tracing the history of the genetics of alcohol dependence that led to the GWAS-era. The first generation of GWAS of alcohol dependence in general have been viewed as yielding disappointing results due to various technical, practical and philosophical issues. Several excellent reviews have highlighted the general findings of these studies and have addressed prevalent GWAS challenges and limitations such as lack of sufficient statistical power due to small sample sizes, small individual gene effects, missing heritability, precision of phenotypes, and the overall lack of replication (Edenberg and Foroud, 2014; Hart and Kranzler, 2015; Tawa et al., 2016). Here we take a more
