Citation:
Gazal S, Finucane HK, Furlotte NA, Loh P-R, Palamara PF, Liu X, Schoech A, Bulik-Sullivan B, Neale BM, Gusev A, Price AL. Linkage disequilibrium-dependent architecture of human complex traits shows action of negative selection. Nat Genet 2017;49(10):1421-1427.
Date Published:
2017 Oct
Abstract:
Recent work has hinted at the linkage disequilibrium (LD)-dependent architecture of human complex traits, where SNPs with low levels of LD (LLD) have larger per-SNP heritability. Here we analyzed summary statistics from 56 complex traits (average N = 101,401) by extending stratified LD score regression to continuous annotations. We determined that SNPs with low LLD have significantly larger per-SNP heritability and that roughly half of this effect can be explained by functional annotations negatively correlated with LLD, such as DNase I hypersensitivity sites (DHSs). The remaining signal is largely driven by our finding that more recent common variants tend to have lower LLD and to explain more heritability (P = 2.38 × 10-104); the youngest 20% of common SNPs explain 3.9 times more heritability than the oldest 20%, consistent with the action of negative selection. We also inferred jointly significant effects of other LD-related annotations and confirmed via forward simulations that they jointly predict deleterious effects.
Last updated on 01/26/2018