Kinship Risk Score (KRS)
The goal of the KRS Project is to identify a set (or sets) of variants across the genome that, together, account for a significant proportion of the phenotypic variance in substance use behaviors. Rather than utilize genome-wide association strategies, which evaluate the effects of single markers with little confidence of successfully being replicated, my collaborators and I have opted to partition variation using genome-wide similarity. While this approach provides greater power to approximate the additive genetic variance observed in twin and family studies, it has the added advantage of providing a more accurate picture of the role of common, and more recently, rare variants on a given behavior/trait.
The challenge, however, is that large sample sizes are needed to realize small effect sizes across chromosomal regions. With that in mind, we are seeking out collaborators who would be interested in sharing their genetically informed samples to support this project.
Collaborators: Jason Bubier, Drs. Leslie Brick, Elissa Chesler, Valerie Knopik, John McGeary, Lauren Micalizzi, Benjamin Raphael, Peter Visscher, Jian Yang.