Our previous research has shown that selective migration driven by socio-economic factors increases the geographic clustering of genes associated with educational attainment. However, there is no direct evidence on the extent to which such selective migration may drive inequalities in other relevant health and economic outcomes. We suspect that the genetic clustering correlates with environmental factors that are related to regional inequalities, which could further induce inequalities on a phenotypic level beyond the expected genetic effects. This project will explore, over a period of approximately 40 years, 1) to what extent selective migration that drives geographic clustering of genes induces gene-environment correlations, 2) to what extent this process gives rise to a range of phenotypic inequalities, and 3) whether it can explain the increase in inequalities that we have seen over the last decades. For this, we will combine genetic data from UK Biobank with migration history, individual-level phenotypic data, and regional-level data on a wide range of characteristics about participants’ neighbourhoods (e.g., economic opportunities, public health) from publicly available databases (e.g., ONS). There will be close collaboration with ESR6, exploring regional heterogeneity in genetic effects.
This project is hosted at VU Amsterdam.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s HORIZON-MSCA-2021-DN-01 programme under grant agreement number 101073237
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