Localizing Components of Shared Transethnic Genetic Architecture of Complex Traits from GWAS Summary Data

Despite strong transethnic genetic correlations reported in the literature for many complex traits, the non-transferability of polygenic risk scores across populations suggests the presence of population-specific components of genetic architecture. We propose an approach that models GWAS summary data for one trait in two populations to estimate genome-wide proportions of population-specific/shared causal SNPs. In simulations across various genetic architectures, we show that our approach yields approximately unbiased estimates with in-sample LD and slight upward-bias with out-of-sample LD.

Source: The American Journal of Human Genetics - May 20, 2020 Category: Genetics & Stem Cells Authors: Huwenbo Shi, Kathryn S. Burch, Ruth Johnson, Malika K. Freund, Gleb Kichaev, Nicholas Mancuso, Astrid M. Manuel, Natalie Dong, Bogdan Pasaniuc Tags: Article Source Type: research