A Rutgers-led consortium reports in Nature Neuroscience that whole-exome sequencing of 3,964 people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, chronic tic disorders including Tourette syndrome, or both, identified 36 high-confidence risk genes. Only four such genes had been established before. The sample included 2,418 parent-child trios. Cases carried an excess of de novo and rare protein-damaging mutations. Thirty of the thirty-six genes appeared in both OCD and tic analyses. Average effect sizes were large. Odds ratios reached as high as about 210-fold at the extreme and about 57-fold on average in the authors’ estimates. Intriguingly, the study also revealed that these newly identified genetic risk factors overlap with genes previously linked to autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia. This genetic convergence suggests that these seemingly distinct psychiatric and neurodevelopmental conditions share common biological roots, particularly within the neural networks governing habit formation, movement, and impulse control. Experts believe this expanded catalog of target genes will revolutionize the medical landscape, offering pharmaceutical companies dozens of new pathways to develop highly targeted, more effective therapies. [Wang, et al. (2026). Whole-exome sequencing in individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder and chronic tic disorders identifies 36 large-effect risk genes. Nature Neuroscience. DOI: 10.1038/s41593-026-02419-5]