Abstract: Depression is a common mental disorder and causes great disease burden. To date peoples understanding of genetic mechanisms of depression is lagging far behind that of other psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Recently, with the accumulation of clinical samples and the advances of methodology and technology, certain progress in genetics of depression has been made. This review summarizes the genetic research progress in candidate genes, common variants, rare variants and chromosome structure variations of depression.

Key words: depression, genetics, research progress