Abstract
SNP-heritability is a fundamental quantity in the study of complex traits. Recent studies have shown that existing methods to estimate genome-wide SNP-heritability can yield biases when their assumptions are violated. While various approaches have been proposed to account for frequency- and linkage disequilibrium (LD)-dependent genetic architectures, it remains unclear which estimates reported in the literature are reliable. Here we show that genome-wide SNP-heritability can be accurately estimated from biobank-scale data irrespective of genetic architecture, without specifying a heritability model or partitioning SNPs by allele frequency and/or LD. We show analytically and through extensive simulations starting from real genotypes (UK Biobank, Nā=ā337āK) that, unlike existing methods, our closed-form estimator is robust across a wide range of architectures. We provide estimates of SNP-heritability for 22 complex traits in the UK Biobank and show that, consistent with our results in simulations, existing biobank-scale methods yield estimates up to 30% different from our theoretically-justified approach.
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Data availability
The baseline-LD annotations used in Fig. 4 are available at https://data.broadinstitute.org/alkesgroup/LDSCORE/. All individual-level genotypes and phenotypes were obtained from the UK Biobank (https://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk); we do not have permission to release this data. The 1000 Genomes Phase 3 reference panel can be downloaded at http://www.internationalgenome.org/data.
Code availability
Open source code implementing the GRE estimator and our simulation framework is available on Github at https://github.com/bogdanlab/h2-GRE.
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Acknowledgements
This research was conducted using the UK Biobank Resource under applications 33297 and 33127. We thank the participants of UK Biobank for making this work possible. We also thank R. Johnson, M. Freund, M. Major, S. Gazal, A. Price and D. Balding for helpful discussions. This work was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under awards R01HG009120, R01MH115676, R01HG006399, U01CA194393, R35GM125055, T32NS048004, T32MH073526 and T32HG002536 and the National Science Foundation (NSF) under award III-1705121.
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K.H., K.S.B., H.S. and B.P. conceived and designed the experiments. K.H. and K.S.B. performed the experiments and statistical analyses. A.M., H.S., N.M. and S.S. provided statistical support. K.H., K.S.B. and Y.W. collected and managed the data. K.S.B. and B.P. wrote the manuscript with the participation of all authors.
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Hou, K., Burch, K.S., Majumdar, A. et al. Accurate estimation of SNP-heritability from biobank-scale data irrespective of genetic architecture. Nat Genet 51, 1244ā1251 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-019-0465-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-019-0465-0
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