SEMINAR: �Searching for causes for schizophrenia using the molecular genetics approach."

Dieter Wildenauer worked for his thesis at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biochemistry, Munich, receiving the PhD degree from the University of Munich. After that he worked as postdoctoral fellow with Gobind Khorana at MIT Cambridge, MA, USA for two years. In 1985 he became interested in Psychiatric Genetics leading research groups at the psychiatric hospital in Munich and later in Bonn. In September 2003 he was appointed professor at UWA and deputy director at CCRN. Together with Sibylle Schwab (now University Erlangen, Germany) he has been leading the CCRN/WAIMR Neuropsychiatric Laboratory at WAIMR.

Schizophrenia has a strong genetic background with heritability estimates up to 80%. As causes have not uncovered by research on a phenotypic level, progress in molecular genetics and in particular in characterization of the human genome has raised the hope to identify genes conferring susceptibility to this devastating mental disorder. We have collected samples with families as well as single patients with the disorder in Germany and more recently in Indonesia for linkage and association studies. A review of our studies in view of world-wide efforts to discover susceptibility genes by linkage and association (GWAS) will be given.