1998). Integrating information across repeated assessments over time should reduce nongenetic variability in the phenotype and increase power to detect genetic determinants. Combining information on multiple genetic determinants via polygenic scoring is another promising approach for explaining variance in complex phenotypes. PS combine information on many genetic variants, each presumed to have small effects, to predict

phenotypes (Purcell et al. 2009). One application Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical of PS combines information on candidate genes previously identified in the scientific literature. This pool is likely enriched with true causal loci, improving overall capacity to predict the phenotype. An alternative PS approach uses genome-wide data, adopting an agnostic prior regarding which alleles are causal and using more liberal P-value thresholds for selecting predictive polymorphisms compared to Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical conventional criterion for genome-wide significance tests (Purcell et al. 2009). For some outcomes, it explained substantially more variance in the phenotype than scores limited to confirmed genotypes (Evans et al. 2009; Purcell et al. 2009). Demirkan et al.

(2011) adopted this approach using the Genetic Association Information Network—Major Depressive Disorder (GAIN-MDD) sample to develop a genome-wide PS that explained up to 1% of the variance in Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical depression. We aimed to estimate the percentage of variance in a long-term average Staurosporine depression phenotype among participants in the Nurses’ Health Study (NHS) that could be explained by PS using a genome-wide Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical scan in NHS (NHS-GWAS-PS) or two external PS using weights derived by Demirkan et al. (GAIN-MDD-PS) or from the Psychiatric GWAS Consortium—Major Depressive

Disorder (PGC-MDD-PS). We also briefly considered variance explained by a PS using candidate genes. On the basis of prior results from Demirkan’s study, we anticipated that the PS could explain approximately 1% of the variance in the depression phenotype. Material Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical and Methods Study participants The NHS is a prospective cohort study of 121,700 U.S. female registered nurses aged 30–55 years at enrollment in 1976. Since then, self-administered questionnaires on medical history and find more lifestyle characteristics have been collected biennially. A subcohort of 32,826 women donated blood samples during 1989–1990. DNA was extracted from white blood cells using the QIAmpTM (Qiagen Inc., Chatsworth, CA) blood protocol and all samples were processed in the same laboratory. In the current analyses, we restricted to genetically defined unrelated white individuals with information on depression and genome-wide scan data available from four independent GWAS nested in NHS that passed quality control (QC) procedures (final analytic N = 6989). Details regarding study design and genotyping QC for each GWAS were reported elsewhere (Cornelis et al.