LAUSR

295 plied in psychiatric genomics in the coming years, it has limitations imposed by the fact that it works by stitching together short reads in silico. This means that there are regions of the genome which are difficult or impossible to read, such as those containing large structural variants, repetitive sequences, extreme guaninecytosine content, or sequences with multiple homologous elements within the genome. This is sometimes known as the “dark genome”. There are now a number of long-read sequencing (LRS) platforms that allow the analysis of segments of the human genome up to 200kb, and these are capable of shining a light into the dark genome. Emerging studies using LRS are identifying larger, more harmful structural variants and long repetitive elements, both of which are candidates for involvement in psychiatric disorders. Psychiatric genomics is a work in progress. GWAS have been hugely successful in identifying the role of multiple common variants, but recent work on missing heritability suggests a need to focus now on rare variants, and in the next few years we can expect studies based upon both SRS and LRS technologies to do this. Fully characterizing the genetic architecture of psychiatric disorders is likely to improve polygenic risk prediction for both screening and stratification, allow a better understanding of the underlying biological mechanisms of disease, and broaden the landscape of pharmaceutical targets.