The missing heritability puzzle – the observation that genetic discovery studies do not explain genetic variation to the extent suggested in twin studies – has driven many methodological developments in quantitative genetics over the past 15 years. We have shown that G×E interplay across countries hides heritability for educational attainment, since meta-analyses of discovery studies cannot properly take this into account. We therefore anticipated that large, homogenous data sources such as the UK Biobank will trigger genetic discoveries, which has been confirmed. However, it is unclear what the hidden environmental factors are, hampering genetic discovery. In this study, we will extend previous work, looking within the UK Biobank for regional heterogeneity in genetic effects on educational attainment. Amongst others, we will explore how stratifying the analysis by regions will further increase genetic variance explanations, investigate the genetic correlation across regions, and include various explicit, regional measures of the environment in the models to develop a theoretical understanding of what drives the modification of genetic associations with educational attainment.
This project is hosted at the University of Bielefeld.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s HORIZON-MSCA-2021-DN-01 programme under grant agreement number 101073237
essgn.org 