Brief description of the Project:

This is the third project (in a group of 3) which form an Interactive Research Project Grant (IRPG). The IRPG mechanism was developed by NIH out of recognition of (a) the need to reconcile congressional mandates for large numbers of research projects to be funded, and (b) the need for complex large budget projects requiring multiple teams of investigators. Each IRPG project component must be feasible if it alone is funded, but with the expectation that the whole will be more than the sum of the parts. The projects are identical in terms of the protocols, the procedures, the subjects and the genetic work. They differ only in their experimental design. IRPG 1 uses an unmatched case-control design; IRPG 2 uses a "big-sibship" design (families that have 5 or more siblings); IRPG 3 uses an EDAC design (families that are extremely discordant or concordant). These projects aim to use combined candidate gene association and quantitative trait locus (QTL) linkage approaches to map genes contributing to heavy drinking and alcohol dependence risk.