Assessing the contribution of rare variants to complex trait heritability from whole-genome sequence data. Nat Genet 2022 Mar;54(3):263-273
Date
03/09/2022Pubmed ID
35256806Pubmed Central ID
PMC9119698DOI
10.1038/s41588-021-00997-7Scopus ID
2-s2.0-85126125467 (requires institutional sign-in at Scopus site) 112 CitationsAbstract
Analyses of data from genome-wide association studies on unrelated individuals have shown that, for human traits and diseases, approximately one-third to two-thirds of heritability is captured by common SNPs. However, it is not known whether the remaining heritability is due to the imperfect tagging of causal variants by common SNPs, in particular whether the causal variants are rare, or whether it is overestimated due to bias in inference from pedigree data. Here we estimated heritability for height and body mass index (BMI) from whole-genome sequence data on 25,465 unrelated individuals of European ancestry. The estimated heritability was 0.68 (standard error 0.10) for height and 0.30 (standard error 0.10) for body mass index. Low minor allele frequency variants in low linkage disequilibrium (LD) with neighboring variants were enriched for heritability, to a greater extent for protein-altering variants, consistent with negative selection. Our results imply that rare variants, in particular those in regions of low linkage disequilibrium, are a major source of the still missing heritability of complex traits and disease.
Author List
Wainschtein P, Jain D, Zheng Z, TOPMed Anthropometry Working Group, NHLBI Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine (TOPMed) Consortium, Cupples LA, Shadyab AH, McKnight B, Shoemaker BM, Mitchell BD, Psaty BM, Kooperberg C, Liu CT, Albert CM, Roden D, Chasman DI, Darbar D, Lloyd-Jones DM, Arnett DK, Regan EA, Boerwinkle E, Rotter JI, O'Connell JR, Yanek LR, de Andrade M, Allison MA, McDonald MN, Chung MK, Fornage M, Chami N, Smith NL, Ellinor PT, Vasan RS, Mathias RA, Loos RJF, Rich SS, Lubitz SA, Heckbert SR, Redline S, Guo X, Chen Y-I, Laurie CA, Hernandez RD, McGarvey ST, Goddard ME, Laurie CC, North KE, Lange LA, Weir BS, Yengo L, Yang J, Visscher PMAuthor
Ulrich Broeckel MD Chief, Center Associate Director, Professor in the Pediatrics department at Medical College of WisconsinMESH terms used to index this publication - Major topics in bold
AllelesGenome-Wide Association Study
Humans
Linkage Disequilibrium
Multifactorial Inheritance
Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide
