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An atlas of genetic associations in UK Biobank

Abstract

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified many loci contributing to variation in complex traits, yet the majority of loci that contribute to the heritability of complex traits remain elusive. Large study populations with sufficient statistical power are required to detect the small effect sizes of the yet unidentified genetic variants. However, the analysis of huge cohorts, like UK Biobank, is challenging. Here, we present an atlas of genetic associations for 118 non-binary and 660 binary traits of 452,264 UK Biobank participants of European ancestry. Results are compiled in a publicly accessible database that allows querying genome-wide association results for 9,113,133 genetic variants, as well as downloading GWAS summary statistics for over 30 million imputed genetic variants (>23 billion phenotype–genotype pairs). Our atlas of associations (GeneATLAS, http://geneatlas.roslin.ed.ac.uk) will help researchers to query UK Biobank results in an easy and uniform way without the need to incur high computational costs.

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Fig. 1: The effect of sample size on the number of GWAS hits and their estimated effects.
Fig. 2: Histograms of numbers of significant associations (two-sided t-test, P < 10−8).
Fig. 3: Number of significant associations (two-sided t-test, P < 10−8).
Fig. 4: Relationship between estimated SNP heritability and numbers of genome-wide significant associations (two-sided t-test, P < 10−8).
Fig. 5: Manhattan plots for selected phenotypes.
Fig. 6: Numbers of phenotypes of different SNP heritability.
Fig. 7: Phenotypic prediction accuracy from genetic markers.

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Data availability

All summary results from the analyses performed are available at the GeneATLAS website, http://geneatlas.roslin.ed.ac.uk/.

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Acknowledgements

This research has been conducted using the UK Biobank Resource under project 788. The work was funded by the Roslin Institute Strategic Programme Grant from the BBSRC (BB/P013732/1) and MRC grant (MR/N003179/1) granted to A.T. A.T. also acknowledges funding from the Medical Research Council and O.C.-X. from MRC fellowship MR/R025851/1. Analyses were performed using the ARCHER UK National Supercomputing Service.

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All authors contributed equally to the design, running of the analyses, and writing of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Albert Tenesa.

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Supplementary Text and Figures

Supplementary Figures 1–24 and Supplementary Note

Reporting Summary

Supplementary Tables 1, 2 and 4–13

Supplementary Tables 1, 2 and 4–13

Supplementary Table 3

List of lead variants for each phenotype

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Canela-Xandri, O., Rawlik, K. & Tenesa, A. An atlas of genetic associations in UK Biobank. Nat Genet 50, 1593–1599 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-018-0248-z

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