However, until now, no one has been able to isolate a particular gene coding for a particular personality trait.
Receptors are molecules that receive messages from chemical messengers like dopamine.
This fourth dopamine receptor is expressed in the limbic part of the brain, the part involved in emotions, and binds with high affinity to clozapine, a drug used to treat schizophrenia. To their excitement they discovered that genetic differences in the dopamine system in fact influenced a trait that had been predicted to be affected by dopamine, namely novelty seeking. Jonathan Benjamin from the Soroka Medical Center, also of Ben Gurion University, who was then at the National Institute of Mental Health in the USA, then repeated the experiment among 315 subjects in America, and reached the same finding. Replications across continents suggest that the discovery may be generalizable. If so, this is the first gene to be reported for a psychological trait.