Our results highlight the need to supplement commercial SNP microarrays for genetic studies of addiction in order to have adequate coverage for genes in relevant neurobiological pathways. Our SNP database will help researchers to fill the missing gaps by providing a quantitative measure of biological relevance to help prioritize SNPs for supplementation. Addiction researchers should find this resource to be a valuable tool, both in the design and interpretation stages of a GWAS. It helps prioritize coverage of biologically relevant regions, and highlights association signals in those regions when selecting SNPs for replication. It also helps prioritize tests of gene-gene interaction, which can limit multiple testing issues. In this study the focus was on addiction, but our method can be extended to other diseases by creating a new database of biologically relevant genes.
