@article {11712, title = {Leveraging population admixture to characterize the heritability of complex traits.}, journal = {Nature genetics}, volume = {46}, year = {2014}, month = {2014 Dec}, pages = {1356-62}, abstract = {

Despite recent progress on estimating the heritability explained by genotyped SNPs (h(2)g), a large gap between h(2)g and estimates of total narrow-sense heritability (h(2)) remains. Explanations for this gap include rare variants or upward bias in family-based estimates of h(2) due to shared environment or epistasis. We estimate h(2) from unrelated individuals in admixed populations by first estimating the heritability explained by local ancestry (h(2)\γ). We show that h(2)\γ = 2FSTC\θ(1 - \θ)h(2), where FSTC measures frequency differences between populations at causal loci and \θ is the genome-wide ancestry proportion. Our approach is not susceptible to biases caused by epistasis or shared environment. We applied this approach to the analysis of 13 phenotypes in 21,497 African-American individuals from 3 cohorts. For height and body mass index (BMI), we obtained h(2) estimates of 0.55 \± 0.09 and 0.23 \± 0.06, respectively, which are larger than estimates of h(2)g in these and other data but smaller than family-based estimates of h(2).

}, keywords = {2014, Scientific Imaging Core Facility}, issn = {1546-1718}, doi = {10.1038/ng.3139}, author = {Zaitlen, Noah and Pasaniuc, Bogdan and Sankararaman, Sriram and Bhatia, Gaurav and Zhang, Jianqi and Gusev, Alexander and Young, Taylor and Tandon, Arti and Pollack, Samuela and Vilhj{\'a}lmsson, Bjarni J and Assimes, Themistocles L and Berndt, Sonja I and Blot, William J and Chanock, Stephen and Franceschini, Nora and Goodman, Phyllis G and He, Jing and Hennis, Anselm J M and Hsing, Ann and Ingles, Sue A and Isaacs, William and Kittles, Rick A and Klein, Eric A and Lange, Leslie A and Nemesure, Barbara and Patterson, Nick and Reich, David and Rybicki, Benjamin A and Stanford, Janet L and Stevens, Victoria L and Strom, Sara S and Whitsel, Eric A and Witte, John S and Xu, Jianfeng and Haiman, Christopher and Wilson, James G and Kooperberg, Charles and Stram, Daniel and Reiner, Alex P and Tang, Hua and Price, Alkes L} }