Brief description of the Project:
This is the first 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. Our 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.
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