With the recent successes of GWA studies, the field has realized that increasingly large sample sizes are required to identify and replicate the increasingly small effect sizes at common variants that remain undetected. Even wider networks will be required to facilitate the study of variation at the lower end of the frequency spectrum (be it single base changes, copy number variants or otherwise). Collaboration and data sharing are invaluable tools in achieving the necessary sample sizes for well-powered replication studies. The past few years have witnessed a rapid rise in international consortium formation and collaboration has taken a most prominent role in conducting research. Consortia allow investigators to make some design choices up front (if only deciding which SNPs to attempt to replicate), and to work together to harmonize phenotypes and analyses. [7] Several examples of notable successes of consortium-coordinated efforts have started to emerge in the literature. [47, 59–62]
