Alison Goate

TL;DR: The Notch signaling pathway plays a role in cell fate specification in many metazoans and recent biochemical and genetic studies have focused on elucidating the function of this protein.

TL;DR: Using self-report of parental history of Alzheimer’s dementia for case ascertainment in a genome-wide association study and meta-analysing with published consortium data, six new AD-associated loci are identified and three contain genes relevant for AD and neurodegeneration.

TL;DR: A genome-wide association study in extended families from the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism to identify novel genes affecting risk for alcohol dependence (AD) identified SNPs in C15orf53 that are strongly associated with DSM-IV alcohol-dependence symptom counts.

TL;DR: Application of conditional analyses is potentially useful in larger sample collections to identify susceptibility genes of modest influence that may not be identified in a genome-wide scan aimed to identify single gene effects.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors developed quantitative phenotypes that characterize drinking patterns among both alcoholic and non-alcoholic subjects, and used these phenotypes in subsequent linkage analyses, finding that the most promising regions of linkage appeared for factor 2, on which higher scores indicate a later age of onset of regular drinking and higher harm avoidance.