Decomposing heritability and genetic covariance by direct and indirect effect paths.

ABSTRACT: Estimation of heritability and genetic covariance is crucial for quantifying and understanding complex trait genetic architecture and is employed in almost all recent genome-wide association studies (GWAS). However, many existing approaches for heritability estimation and almost all methods for estimating genetic correlation ignore the presence of indirect genetic effects, i.e., genotype-phenotype associations confounded by the parental genome and family environment, and may thus lead to incorrect interpretation especially for human sociobehavioral phenotypes. In this work, we introduce a statistical framework to decompose heritability and genetic covariance into multiple components representing direct and indirect effect paths. Applied to five traits in UK Biobank, we found substantial in

SUBMITTER: Song J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9894552 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature