We carried out a large bipolar disorder (BD) GWAS and identified 30 genome-wide significant loci, including 20 that were novel. Previous BD GWAS have reported a total of 20 loci significantly associated with BD9–23 ; twelve of these previously reported loci were not genome-wide significant in our GWAS meta analysis, but all had PGWAS ≤ 1.3×10−5 (Supplementary Table 4C). Our recent GWAS of BD and SCZ 52, which included our discovery GWAS data jointly analyzed with published SCZ data 31 (without overlapping control subjects), highlighted similarities and differences in BD and SCZ in terms of known associated SNPs and PRS-subphenotype associations; here we maximized power to identify BD associations. Phenotypic variance explained by polygenic risk scores (PRS) based on our BD GWAS data is ~8% (observed scale; 4% on the liability scale 53), an increase from 2.8% (1.2% on the liability scale) in our previous study 9. The results of our BD subtype PRS analyses support the nosological distinction between BD1 and BD2, but also highlight the importance of psychosis beyond DSM subtypes, corroborating and expanding evidence from previous clinical
