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  • mtPGS: Leverage multiple co...
    Xu, Chang; Ganesh, Santhi K.; Zhou, Xiang

    American journal of human genetics, 10/2023, Volume: 110, Issue: 10
    Journal Article

    Accurate polygenic scores (PGSs) facilitate the genetic prediction of complex traits and aid in the development of personalized medicine. Here, we develop a statistical method called multi-trait assisted PGS (mtPGS), which can construct accurate PGSs for a target trait of interest by leveraging multiple traits relevant to the target trait. Specifically, mtPGS borrows SNP effect size similarity information between the target trait and its relevant traits to improve the effect size estimation on the target trait, thus achieving accurate PGSs. In the process, mtPGS flexibly models the shared genetic architecture between the target and the relevant traits to achieve robust performance, while explicitly accounting for the environmental covariance among them to accommodate different study designs with various sample overlap patterns. In addition, mtPGS uses only summary statistics as input and relies on a deterministic algorithm with several algebraic techniques for scalable computation. We evaluate the performance of mtPGS through comprehensive simulations and applications to 25 traits in the UK Biobank, where in the real data mtPGS achieves an average of 0.90%–52.91% accuracy gain compared to the state-of-the-art PGS methods. Overall, mtPGS represents an accurate, fast, and robust solution for PGS construction in biobank-scale datasets. Xu et al. propose a statistical method called multi-trait assisted polygenic scores (mtPGS) that constructs accurate polygenic scores for a complex trait of interest by leveraging multiple correlated traits. mtPGS demonstrates enhanced predictive performance in simulations and real applications in the UK Biobank dataset.