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Linkage disequilibrium–dependent architecture of human complex traits shows action of negative selection

An Author Correction to this article was published on 04 July 2019

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.

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Figure 1: Effect sizes of MAF-adjusted LLD on 20 highly heritable complex traits.
Figure 2: Correlations between LD-related and functional annotations.
Figure 3: Effect sizes of LD-related annotations subjected to meta-analysis over 31 independent traits.
Figure 4: Proportion of heritability explained by the quintiles of each LD-related annotation, subjected to meta-analysis over 31 independent traits.
Figure 5: Forward simulations confirm that LD-related annotations predict deleterious effects.
Figure 6: Simulations to assess the extension of stratified LD score regression to continuous LD-related annotations.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the research participants and employees of 23andMe for making this work possible. We thank S. Sunyaev, Y. Reshef, G. Kichaev, D. Speed, and F. Day for helpful discussions. This research has been conducted using the UK Biobank Resource (application number 16549). This research was funded by NIH grants R01 MH101244, R01 MH107649, and U01 HG009088.

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Authors

Contributions

S.G. and A.L.P. designed experiments. S.G. performed experiments. S.G., H.K.F., N.A.F., and P.-R.L. analyzed data. S.G. and A.L.P. wrote the manuscript with assistance from H.K.F., N.A.F., P.-R.L., P.F.P., X.L., A.S., B.B.-S., B.M.N., and A.G.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Steven Gazal or Alkes L Price.

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Competing interests

N.A.F. is an employee of 23andMe, Inc.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Text and Figures

Supplementary Figures 1–8 and 10–16, Supplementary Tables 5, 6, 8a, 10–16, 18–22, 24 and 25, and Supplementary Note (PDF 5807 kb)

Life Sciences Reporting Summary (PDF 159 kb)

Supplementary Tables 1–4, 7, 8b,c, 17 and 23

Supplementary Tables 1–4, 7, 8b,c, 17 and 23 (XLSX 150 kb)

Supplementary Figure 9

Proportion of heritability explained by the quintiles of each LD-related annotation of the baseline-LD model for each of the 62 data sets analyzed. (PDF 181 kb)

Supplementary Table 9

Effect size and enrichment of each annotation of the baseline-LD model in each of the 62 data sets analyzed. (XLSX 342 kb)

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Gazal, S., Finucane, H., Furlotte, N. et al. Linkage disequilibrium–dependent architecture of human complex traits shows action of negative selection. Nat Genet 49, 1421–1427 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3954

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