Results from the GWAS focused on alcohol use phenotypes across AA and EA populations have yielded mixed results. Two of the four GWAS containing diverse samples were unable to detect SNPs of genome-wide significance in either AA or EA populations, although the top findings in EA and AA implicated different genes.14,45 Beirut et al. found that none of the top SNPs from the EA and AA populations overlapped.46 However, in further analyses of these samples Zuo et al.15 found evidence that the gene KIAA0040 was associated with alcohol dependence in both EAs and AAs, using the replication across diverse samples to bolster evidence of a causal variant.15 A more recent GWAS combined multiple samples containing individuals of AA and EA descent,47 resulting in significantly enhanced power (n=16,087). Researchers were able to detect SNPs with genome wide-significance in both EA and AA populations. Top SNPs from both populations were then successfully replicated in independent samples. Results from this GWAS suggested population specific SNPs related to alcohol dependence (AD). However, although the individual SNPs differed across populations, many were located in similar
