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Research in the Molecular Psychiatry Laboratory has used genetics as a method to understand the abnormal neurobiology causing schizophrenia, affective disorders and alcoholism. The Molecular Psychiatry Laboratory has completed genome wide linkage scans on family samples of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and Tourette syndrome in order to localise susceptibility genes to specific regions of chromosomes.
Genome Wide Association scans with SNP arrays have been completed on schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, alcohol dependence including sub samples Wernicke Korsakov's syndrome and alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver.
Families of glutamate receptor genes as well as calcium channel genes have now been implicated in schizophrenia as well as bipolar disorder. A second major effort in the Molecular Psychiatry Laboratory concerns the use of systems biology and pharmacogenomics to point the way to new drug and preventive strategies for the psychoses.