Springer Nature

Joshua Gordon is a professor and chair of the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University, and one of the authors of a new study in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. There can be a strong genetic risk factor for schizophrenia, and loss of function mutations in the gene SETDIA raise the risk of schizophrenia by about 60-80 fold, a dramatic increase in risk. Sofiya Hupalo is the clinical and regulatory science lead at the Usona Institute and is another one of the study’s authors.

Heredity is launching a mentoring scheme to help Early Career Researchers gain experience of editing for a journal. Clio Karageorgiou explains the idea and how you can get involved.

Turning the lens on the history of genetics itself, we talk to authors of an article examining its historical relationship with the eugenics movement, which promoted the since discredited idea that genetic improvement techniques could and should be applied to human populations.

This episode features a conversation with Professor Philippe Grandjean, professor of Environmental Medicine at the National Institute of Public Health in Denmark and Adjunct Professor at the University of Rhode Island, noted for his research on the developmental toxicity of certain environmental chemicals.

Problematic alcohol use frequently occurs in conjunction with anxiety disorders. Between 20 to 40 percent of individuals with anxiety disorders are also diagnosed with alcohol use disorder. Anxiety can lead people to use alcohol to self-medicate, and disordered alcohol use can cause increased anxiety for people when they go through withdrawal.

Joshua Gray is an associate professor in the department of psychology at Uniformed Services University, and one of the authors of a new study in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. For the study, he and his colleagues drew on data from biobanks that originally included more than a million individuals. The samples were then modified to minimize overlap between the datasets, and the team ended up with about 860,000 individuals in the problematic alcohol use analysis and about 620,000 in the anxiety analysis.

Read the full study here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-026-02494-z

We hear from Clio Karageorgiou about her work and a recent special issue of Heredity on the same topic - structural variation.

In this episode, Geoff speaks to Early Career Investigators, Dr. Kazumasa Zensho from the University of Okayama, Japan. They discuss his recent paper, 'Umbilical cord blood markers predict neonatal hypoglycemia in full-term small and large for gestational age infants'.

This episode features a conversation with Professor Diana Bianchi, former Director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), who is noted for her pioneering research on non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT).

Insomnia and depression are two serious and debilitating conditions. Insomnia on its own is linked to an increase in suicide risk, and insomnia can also exacerbate the severity of depression.

Andrea Goldstein-Piekarski, assistant professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, and Adam Krause, post-doctoral research fellow in Stanford’s psychiatry department, are two of the authors of a recent study in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, or CBTI, is the gold standard for treating insomnia, and it’s been shown to relieve depressive symptoms as well.

Read the full study here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-026-02431-0

We hear from Portia Wong and Paolo Momigliano about using samples seized from the illegal wildlife trade to inform the conservation of endangered pangolins.