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Volume 562 Issue 7726, 11 October 2018

National health analysis

The UK Biobank is a prospective cohort study that has collected genetic and phenotypic data from some 500,000 people aged 40–69 from across the United Kingdom. The participants have undergone health measurements, provided blood, urine and saliva samples, given detailed information about themselves and agreed to have their health followed. In this week’s issue, Jonathan Marchini, Peter Donnelly and their colleagues report on the data set for the full cohort, including high-resolution genetic data and demonstration of their use in genetic association studies. In an accompanying paper, Stephen Smith, Jonathan Marchini and colleagues report brain imaging of the first 8,428 UK Biobank participants and the results of genome-wide association studies of 3,144 functional and structural brain-imaging phenotypes. They find that many of the traits are heritable and uncover many regions of the genome linked to these structural and functional measures. All of the data sets and research results from the UK Biobank are available to researchers as an open-access resource.

Cover image: Kelly Krause/Nature

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