The goal of this project is to identify causal intergenerational effects on educational achievement. Novel approaches will be employed to separate parental genetic variants into those that were inherited by the child and those that were not inherited. Trio-GCTA, an innovative variance partitioning approach based on genotype data from parents and their children, will be used to quantify the total contributions of direct and indirect genetic effects of mothers and fathers on offspring educational achievement (standardized test scores, grades, and educational attainment). To investigate the specifics of indirect genetic effects, we will calculate transmitted and non-transmitted polygenic scores for parental putative risk and protective traits and compare their association with offspring outcomes. The polygenic score analyses will be followed up with formal causal inference approaches such as Mendelian randomization to better account for potential confounding by biological pleiotropy, employing genetic variants as instrumental variables for parental traits. MoBa is the largest sample of genotyped general population trio cohorts to date, affording unprecedented power to account for genetic transmission and identify causal intergenerational effects. The findings will be compared to those from ESR2, exploring intergenerational persistence in Norway.
This project is hosted at University of Oslo.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s HORIZON-MSCA-2021-DN-01 programme under grant agreement number 101073237
essgn.org 