“Science, like most forms of human activity, is occasionally liable to lose sight of its ultimate ends under a flood of controversy, the strugglings of personal ambition, or the fight for pecuniary ...rewards or less physical honors … Celebrated across the world as a major turning point in the young science of genetics, the paper formally reconciled mendelian and biometric approaches to inheritance by introducing the concepts of variance and polygenicity and laying the groundwork for the complex trait liability threshold model, which remains highly relevant to modern human genetics 2. Through years of painstaking data collection and analysis, the team eventually began to realize that anthropometric traits that distinguished different crab species also varied greatly within species. ...upon the collection of enough data, even “dimorphic” traits appeared continuous. ...they came to believe that the most likely mechanism to explain evolution was slow and gradual natural selection.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Nearly all human complex traits and disease phenotypes exhibit some degree of sex differences, including differences in prevalence, age of onset, severity or disease progression. Until recently, the ...underlying genetic mechanisms of such sex differences have been largely unexplored. Advances in genomic technologies and analytical approaches are now enabling a deeper investigation into the effect of sex on human health traits. In this Review, we discuss recent insights into the genetic models and mechanisms that lead to sex differences in complex traits. This knowledge is critical for developing deeper insight into the fundamental biology of sex differences and disease processes, thus facilitating precision medicine.
Females with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), the most common endocrine disorder in women, have an increased risk of developing cardiometabolic disorders such as insulin resistance, obesity, and ...type 2 diabetes (T2D). While only diagnosable in females, males with a family history of PCOS can also exhibit a poor cardiometabolic profile. Therefore, we aimed to elucidate the role of sex in the cardiometabolic comorbidities observed in PCOS by conducting bidirectional genetic risk score analyses in both sexes. We first conducted a phenome-wide association study (PheWAS) using PCOS polygenic risk scores (PCOSPRS) to identify potential pleiotropic effects of PCOSPRS across 1,380 medical conditions recorded in the Vanderbilt University Medical Center electronic health record (EHR) database, in females and males. After adjusting for age and genetic ancestry, we found that European (EUR)-ancestry males with higher PCOSPRS were significantly more likely to develop hypertensive diseases than females at the same level of genetic risk. We performed the same analysis in an African (AFR)-ancestry population, but observed no significant associations, likely due to poor trans-ancestry performance of the PRS. Based on observed significant associations in the EUR-ancestry population, we then tested whether the PRS for comorbid conditions (e.g., T2D, body mass index (BMI), hypertension, etc.) also increased the odds of a PCOS diagnosis. Only BMIPRS and T2DPRS were significantly associated with a PCOS diagnosis in EUR-ancestry females. We then further adjusted the T2DPRS for measured BMI and BMIresidual (regressed on the BMIPRS and enriched for the environmental contribution to BMI). Results demonstrated that genetically regulated BMI primarily accounted for the relationship between T2DPRS and PCOS. Overall, our findings show that the genetic architecture of PCOS has distinct sex differences in associations with genetically correlated cardiometabolic traits. It is possible that the cardiometabolic comorbidities observed in PCOS are primarily explained by their shared genetic risk factors, which can be further influenced by biological variables including sex and BMI.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a multifactorial neurodevelopmental disorder that encompasses a complex and heterogeneous set of traits. Subclinical traits that mirror the core features of ASD, ...referred to as the broad autism phenotype (BAP), have been documented repeatedly in unaffected relatives and are believed to reflect underlying genetic liability to ASD. The BAP may help inform the etiology of ASD by allowing the stratification of families into more phenotypically and etiologically homogeneous subgroups. This study explores polygenic scores related to the BAP.
Phenotypic and genotypic information were obtained from 2614 trios from the Simons Simplex Collection. Polygenic scores of ASD (ASD-PGSs) were generated across the sample to determine the shared genetic overlap between the BAP and ASD. Maternal and paternal ASD-PGSs were explored in relation to BAP traits and their child's ASD symptomatology.
Maternal pragmatic language was related to child’s social communicative atypicalities. In fathers, rigid personality was related to increased repetitive behaviors in children. Maternal (but not paternal) ASD-PGSs were related to the pragmatic language and rigid BAP domains.
Associations emerged between parent and child phenotypes, with more associations emerging in mothers than in fathers. ASD-PGS associations emerged with BAP in mothers only, highlighting the potential for a female protective factor, and implicating the polygenic etiology of ASD-related phenotypes in the BAP.
Objective:Individuals at high risk for schizophrenia may benefit from early intervention, but few validated risk predictors are available. Genetic profiling is one approach to risk stratification ...that has been extensively validated in research cohorts. The authors sought to test the utility of this approach in clinical settings and to evaluate the broader health consequences of high genetic risk for schizophrenia.Methods:The authors used electronic health records for 106,160 patients from four health care systems to evaluate the penetrance and pleiotropy of genetic risk for schizophrenia. Polygenic risk scores (PRSs) for schizophrenia were calculated from summary statistics and tested for association with 1,359 disease categories, including schizophrenia and psychosis, in phenome-wide association studies. Effects were combined through meta-analysis across sites.Results:PRSs were robustly associated with schizophrenia (odds ratio per standard deviation increase in PRS, 1.55; 95% CI=1.4, 1.7), and patients in the highest risk decile of the PRS distribution had up to 4.6-fold higher odds of schizophrenia compared with those in the bottom decile (95% CI=2.9, 7.3). PRSs were also positively associated with other phenotypes, including anxiety, mood, substance use, neurological, and personality disorders, as well as suicidal behavior, memory loss, and urinary syndromes; they were inversely related to obesity.Conclusions:The study demonstrates that an available measure of genetic risk for schizophrenia is robustly associated with schizophrenia in health care settings and has pleiotropic effects on related psychiatric disorders as well as other medical syndromes. The results provide an initial indication of the opportunities and limitations that may arise with the future application of PRS testing in health care systems.
Despite rapid progress in characterizing the role of host genetics in SARS-Cov-2 infection, there is limited understanding of genes and pathways that contribute to COVID-19. Here, we integrate a ...genome-wide association study of COVID-19 hospitalization (7,885 cases and 961,804 controls from COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative) with mRNA expression, splicing, and protein levels (n = 18,502). We identify 27 genes related to inflammation and coagulation pathways whose genetically predicted expression was associated with COVID-19 hospitalization. We functionally characterize the 27 genes using phenome- and laboratory-wide association scans in Vanderbilt Biobank (n = 85,460) and identified coagulation-related clinical symptoms, immunologic, and blood-cell-related biomarkers. We replicate these findings across trans-ethnic studies and observed consistent effects in individuals of diverse ancestral backgrounds in Vanderbilt Biobank, pan-UK Biobank, and Biobank Japan. Our study highlights and reconfirms putative causal genes impacting COVID-19 severity and symptomology through the host inflammatory response.
Anorexia nervosa (AN) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) are often comorbid and likely to share genetic risk factors. Hence, we examine their shared genetic background using a cross-disorder ...GWAS meta-analysis of 3495 AN cases, 2688 OCD cases, and 18,013 controls. We confirmed a high genetic correlation between AN and OCD (r
= 0.49 ± 0.13, p = 9.07 × 10
) and a sizable SNP heritability (SNP h
= 0.21 ± 0.02) for the cross-disorder phenotype. Although no individual loci reached genome-wide significance, the cross-disorder phenotype showed strong positive genetic correlations with other psychiatric phenotypes (e.g., r
= 0.36 with bipolar disorder and 0.34 with neuroticism) and negative genetic correlations with metabolic phenotypes (e.g., r
= -0.25 with body mass index and -0.20 with triglycerides). Follow-up analyses revealed that although AN and OCD overlap heavily in their shared risk with other psychiatric phenotypes, the relationship with metabolic and anthropometric traits is markedly stronger for AN than for OCD. We further tested whether shared genetic risk for AN/OCD was associated with particular tissue or cell-type gene expression patterns and found that the basal ganglia and medium spiny neurons were most enriched for AN-OCD risk, consistent with neurobiological findings for both disorders. Our results confirm and extend genetic epidemiological findings of shared risk between AN and OCD and suggest that larger GWASs are warranted.
Two obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have been published by independent OCD consortia, the International Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Foundation Genetics ...Collaborative (IOCDF-GC) and the OCD Collaborative Genetics Association Study (OCGAS), but many of the top-ranked signals were supported in only one study. We therefore conducted a meta-analysis from the two consortia, investigating a total of 2688 individuals of European ancestry with OCD and 7037 genomically matched controls. No single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) reached genome-wide significance. However, in comparison with the two individual GWASs, the distribution of P-values shifted toward significance. The top haplotypic blocks were tagged with rs4733767 (P=7.1 × 10
; odds ratio (OR)=1.21; confidence interval (CI): 1.12-1.31, CASC8/CASC11), rs1030757 (P=1.1 × 10
; OR=1.18; CI: 1.10-1.26, GRID2) and rs12504244 (P=1.6 × 10
; OR=1.18; CI: 1.11-1.27, KIT). Variants located in or near the genes ASB13, RSPO4, DLGAP1, PTPRD, GRIK2, FAIM2 and CDH20, identified in linkage peaks and the original GWASs, were among the top signals. Polygenic risk scores for each individual study predicted case-control status in the other by explaining 0.9% (P=0.003) and 0.3% (P=0.0009) of the phenotypic variance in OCGAS and the European IOCDF-GC target samples, respectively. The common SNP heritability in the combined OCGAS and IOCDF-GC sample was estimated to be 0.28 (s.e.=0.04). Strikingly, ∼65% of the SNP-based heritability in the OCGAS sample was accounted for by SNPs with minor allele frequencies of ⩾40%. This joint analysis constituting the largest single OCD genome-wide study to date represents a major integrative step in elucidating the genetic causes of OCD.
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