This special topic comprises a set of papers read by international experts during a symposium in Giessen on the occasion of awarding the RSA, a prestigious biannual award honoring an outstanding schizophrenia reseacher to Prof. Shitij Kapur (Institute of Psychiatry, London). The topic is dopaminergic mechanisms of psychiatric disorders, especially schizophrenia, with regard to salience. Papers range from genetics of dopaminergic candidate genes and genome-wide significant variants, to neuroimaging studies of dopamine receptor mapping, genetic and environmental risk factor effects, structural and functional effects of dopaminergic manipulation and mechanisms of salience attribution and theory of mind to studies in schizophrenic patients and subjects with autism. The topic provides a state of the art review of this important unifying hypothesis in psychiatric research that has major implications for the understanding of the psychopathology of mental illness, as well as for development of novel therapeutics.

Deadline for submission
September 01, 2009