The results of these preliminary analyses of potential synteny between human and mouse QTLs, while limited in scope, do provide evidence that this approach is promising. Mapping animal QTLs onto human linkage findings has the potential to narrow down a broad region of linkage and provides further confidence that there are gene(s) in the region involved in alcohol-related phenotypes. This in turn may help prioritize regions for follow-up in both human and animal studies. Our finding of the utility of this approach is consistent with a previous study that compared genome-wide association studies of SNPs from individuals with dependence on a variety of addictive substances to QTL results from studies of addiction-related phenotypes in mice that focused on alcohol, methamphetamine and barbiturates (see Uhl et al., 2008). The present study differs from previous attempts as it focused on human QTL data from linkage analyses and on genomic locations where more than one study had found suggestive evidence for linkage. It also intentionally restricted the search to two mouse phenotypes.
