Estimation of cross-ancestry genetic correlations within ancestry tracts of admixed samples
Elizabeth G. Atkinson | Nature Genetics
Quantifying whether different populations share similar effect sizes of common causal variants is vital to understand the genetic basis of disease and build better prediction models. A new study proposes a method leveraging admixture to estimate the correlation of causal genetic variants and finds they are largely similar across ancestry backgrounds.
Nature Genetics
Abstract
Individuals of admixed ancestries (for example, African Americans) inherit a mosaic of ancestry segments (local ancestry) originating from multiple continental ancestral populations. This offers the unique opportunity of investigating the similarity of genetic effects on traits across ancestries within the same population. Here we introduce an approach to estimate correlation of causal genetic effects (radmix) across local ancestries and analyze 38 complex traits in African-European admixed individuals (N = 53,001) to observe very high correlations (meta-analysis radmix = 0.95, 95% credible interval 0.93–0.97), much higher than correlation of causal effects across continental ancestries. We replicate our results using regression-based methods from marginal genome-wide association study summary statistics. We also report realistic scenarios where regression-based methods yield inflated heterogeneity-by-ancestry due to ancestry-specific tagging of causal effects, and/or polygenicity. Our results motivate genetic analyses that assume minimal heterogeneity in causal effects by ancestry, with implications for the inclusion of ancestry-diverse individuals in studies.
Authors:
Kangcheng Hou, Yi Ding, Ziqi Xu, Yue Wu, Arjun Bhattacharya, Rachel Mester, Gillian M. Belbin, Steve Buyske, David V. Conti, Burcu F. Darst, Myriam Fornage, Chris Gignoux, Xiuqing Guo, Christopher Haiman, Eimear E. Kenny, Michelle Kim, Charles Kooperberg, Leslie Lange, Ani Manichaikul, Kari E. North, Ulrike Peters, Laura J. Rasmussen-Torvik, Stephen S. Rich, Jerome I. Rotter, Bogdan Pasaniuc