Phenotypic covariance across the entire spectrum of relatedness for 86 billion pairs of individuals

Kathryn E. Kemper (), Loic Yengo, Zhili Zheng, Abdel Abdellaoui, Matthew C. Keller, Michael E. Goddard, Naomi R. Wray, Jian Yang and Peter M. Visscher ()
Additional contact information
Kathryn E. Kemper: University of Queensland
Loic Yengo: University of Queensland
Zhili Zheng: University of Queensland
Abdel Abdellaoui: University of Amsterdam
Matthew C. Keller: University of Colorado at Boulder
Michael E. Goddard: University of Melbourne
Naomi R. Wray: University of Queensland
Jian Yang: University of Queensland
Peter M. Visscher: University of Queensland

Nature Communications, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-11

Abstract: Abstract Attributing the similarity between individuals to genetic and non-genetic factors is central to genetic analyses. In this paper we use the genomic relationship ( $$\pi$$ π ) among 417,060 individuals to investigate the phenotypic covariance between pairs of individuals for 32 traits across the spectrum of relatedness, from unrelated pairs through to identical twins. We find linear relationships between phenotypic covariance and $$\pi$$ π that agree with the SNP-based heritability ( $$\hat h_{SNP}^2$$ h ̂ S N P 2 ) in unrelated pairs ( $$\pi \, \, 0.05$$ π > 0.05 ). The covariance increases faster than $$\pi \hat h_{SNP}^2$$ π h ̂ S N P 2 in distant relatives ( $$0.02 \, > \, \pi \, > \, 0.05$$ 0.02 > π > 0.05 ), and we attribute this to imperfect linkage disequilibrium between causal variants and the common variants used to construct $$\pi$$ π . We also examine the effect of assortative mating on heritability estimates from different experimental designs. We find that full-sib identity-by-descent regression estimates for height (0.66 s.e. 0.07) are consistent with estimates from close relatives (0.82 s.e. 0.04) after accounting for the effect of assortative mating.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21283-4 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:12:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-021-21283-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-21283-4

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().