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Sizing up human height variation

Genome-wide association studies have identified many variants affecting susceptibility to disease. Now, three studies use this approach to study adult height variation in a combined sample size of 63,000 individuals and report a total of 54 validated variants influencing this trait.

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Figure 1: Statistical power of detection in GWAS for variants that explain 0.1–0.5% of the variation at a type I error rate of 5 × 10−7 (calculated using the Genetic Power Calculator15).

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Visscher, P. Sizing up human height variation. Nat Genet 40, 489–490 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng0508-489

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