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- Title
Leveraging population admixture to characterize the heritability of complex traits.
- Authors
Zaitlen, Noah; Franceschini, Nora; Whitsel, Eric A; Goodman, Phyllis G; Hennis, Anselm J M; Hsing, Ann; Isaacs, William; Kittles, Rick A; Klein, Eric A; Lange, Leslie A; Nemesure, Barbara; Reich, David; Pasaniuc, Bogdan; Rybicki, Benjamin A; Stanford, Janet L; Kooperberg, Charles; Stevens, Victoria L; Strom, Sara S; Witte, John S; Xu, Jianfeng
- Abstract
Despite recent progress on estimating the heritability explained by genotyped SNPs (h2g), a large gap between h2g and estimates of total narrow-sense heritability (h2) remains. Explanations for this gap include rare variants or upward bias in family-based estimates of h2 due to shared environment or epistasis. We estimate h2 from unrelated individuals in admixed populations by first estimating the heritability explained by local ancestry (h2γ). We show that h2γ = 2FSTCθ(1 − θ)h2, where FSTC measures frequency differences between populations at causal loci and θ is the genome-wide ancestry proportion. Our approach is not susceptible to biases caused by epistasis or shared environment. We applied this approach to the analysis of 13 phenotypes in 21,497 African-American individuals from 3 cohorts. For height and body mass index (BMI), we obtained h2 estimates of 0.55 ± 0.09 and 0.23 ± 0.06, respectively, which are larger than estimates of h2g in these and other data but smaller than family-based estimates of h2.
- Subjects
HERITABILITY; PHENOTYPES; CHROMOSOMES; GENOTYPES; AFRICAN Americans
- Publication
Nature Genetics, 2014, Vol 46, Issue 12, p1356
- ISSN
1061-4036
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1038/ng.3139