Understanding the pathways of risk associated with identified susceptibility genes will be critical to potentially use genetic information in the future to inform prevention and intervention efforts. This must involve understanding how this risk unfolds across development, and in conjunction with environmental factors. Developmental scientists are well-equipped to make important contributions to this endeavor, with a long history of careful research on mechanistic processes, mediating and moderating variables, and articulated theory and conceptual frameworks to guide research. However, for this research to reach its potential, developmental scientists and geneticists need to reach across disciplinary boundaries and integrate the methods and findings from each respective field. For developmental scientists, this must involve going beyond studying “the usual suspects” and working with geneticists involved in gene finding projects to study novel genes currently being identified. It must also involve moving beyond studying one or two purportedly functional polymorphisms, and doing a more careful and thorough job of characterizing the gene of interest based on knowledge about the underlying gene structure.
