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Science 26 June 2009:
Vol. 324. no. 5935, p. 1628
DOI: 10.1126/science.324_1628
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News of the Week

Depression Gene:

Back to the Drawing Board for Psychiatric Genetics

Constance Holden

In 2003, researchers landed a huge catch: a gene variant that seemed to play a major role in whether people get depressed in response to life's stresses or sail through. The find, a polymorphism related to the neurotransmitter serotonin, was heralded as a prime example of "gene-environment interaction": whereby an environmental trigger influences the activity of a gene in a way that confers susceptibility. But an exhaustive new meta-analysis published last week in The Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that the big fish may be a minnow at best. A different team reanalyzed data from 14 studies, including the original one, and found that the cumulative data fail to support a connection between the gene, life stress, and depression.

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)