Journal
TRANSLATIONAL PSYCHIATRY
Volume 4, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/tp.2014.81
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Funding
- Swiss National Science Foundation [CRSI33_130080, CRSII1_136227]
- Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) [CRSI33_130080] Funding Source: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF)
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Working memory (WM) is an important endophenotype in neuropsychiatric research and its use in genetic association studies is thought to be a promising approach to increase our understanding of psychiatric disease. As for any genetically complex trait, demonstration of sufficient heritability within the specific study context is a prerequisite for conducting genetic studies of that trait. Recently developed methods allow estimating trait heritability using sets of common genetic markers from genome-wide association study (GWAS) data in samples of unrelated individuals. Here we present single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)-based heritability estimates (h(SNP)(2)) for a WM phenotype. A Caucasian sample comprising a total of N = 2298 healthy and young individuals was subjected to an N-back WM task. We calculated the genetic relationship between all individuals on the basis of genome-wide SNP data and performed restricted maximum likelihood analyses for variance component estimation to derive the h2 SNP estimates. Heritability estimates for three 2-back derived WM performance measures based on all autosomal chromosomes ranged between 31 and 41%, indicating a substantial SNP-based heritability for WM traits. These results indicate that common genetic factors account for a prominent part of the phenotypic variation in WM performance. Hence, the application of GWAS on WM phenotypes is a valid method to identify the molecular underpinnings of WM.
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