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Genetic drift from the out-of-Africa bottleneck leads to biased estimation of genetic architecture and selection

Ashraf, Bilal; Lawson, Daniel John

Genetic drift from the out-of-Africa bottleneck leads to biased estimation of genetic architecture and selection Thumbnail


Authors

Daniel John Lawson



Abstract

Most complex traits evolved in the ancestors of all modern humans and have been under negative or balancing selection to maintain the distribution of phenotypes observed today. Yet all large studies mapping genomes to complex traits occur in populations that have experienced the Out-of-Africa bottleneck. Does this bottleneck affect the way we characterise complex traits? We demonstrate using the 1000 Genomes dataset and hypothetical complex traits that genetic drift can strongly affect the joint distribution of effect size and SNP frequency, and that the bias can be positive or negative depending on subtle details. Characterisations that rely on this distribution therefore conflate genetic drift and selection. We provide a model to identify the underlying selection parameter in the presence of drift, and demonstrate that a simple sensitivity analysis may be enough to validate existing characterisations. We conclude that biobanks characterising more worldwide diversity would benefit studies of complex traits.

Citation

Ashraf, B., & Lawson, D. J. (2021). Genetic drift from the out-of-Africa bottleneck leads to biased estimation of genetic architecture and selection. European Journal of Human Genetics, 29(10), 1549-1556. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41431-021-00873-2

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Mar 17, 2021
Online Publication Date Apr 13, 2021
Publication Date 2021-10
Deposit Date Sep 1, 2021
Publicly Available Date Sep 1, 2021
Journal European Journal of Human Genetics
Print ISSN 1018-4813
Electronic ISSN 1476-5438
Publisher Springer Nature [academic journals on nature.com]
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 29
Issue 10
Pages 1549-1556
DOI https://doi.org/10.1038/s41431-021-00873-2

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
Advance online version This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.





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