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Anxiety disorders are the most common class of psychiatric disorders and incur an enormous burden in terms of economic costs, disability and personal suffering. Despite their public health importance and documented heritability, genetic research aimed at identifying the genetic contributions to these disorders has had limited success, particularly in comparison to recent advances in the genetics of other major psychiatric disorders. The major factor contributing to this lagging progress has been a dearth of well-powered genomic studies. As a result, the genetic basis of anxiety disorders remains a largely uncharted frontier. In this Special Issue, we bring together dispatches from this frontier, reflecting a range of strategies being pursued including genomewide common variant association studies, exome sequencing, genetic prediction of treatment response, cross-disorder genetic epidemiology, and the prospects for dissecting underlying anxiety domains using the RDoC framework. Overall, these efforts underscore the genetic and phenotypic complexity of pathologic anxiety and the urgent need for more powerful and comprehensive analyses if we are to make real progress in advancing this important frontier. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.