School of Medicine Publications and Presentations
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
11-2021
Abstract
Imaging genetics analyses use neuroimaging traits as intermediate phenotypes to infer the degree of genetic contribution to brain structure and function in health and/or illness. Coefficients of relatedness (CR) summarize the degree of genetic similarity among subjects and are used to estimate the heritability – the proportion of phenotypic variance explained by genetic factors. The CR can be inferred directly from genome-wide genotype data to explain the degree of shared variation in common genetic polymorphisms (SNP-heritability) among related or unrelated subjects. We developed a central processing and graphics processing unit (CPU and GPU) accelerated Fast and Powerful Heritability Inference (FPHI) approach that linearizes likelihood calculations to overcome the ∼N2–3 computational effort dependency on sample size of classical likelihood approaches. We calculated for 60 regional and 1.3 × 105 voxel-wise traits in N = 1,206 twin and sibling participants from the Human Connectome Project (HCP) (550 M/656 F, age = 28.8 ± 3.7 years) and N = 37,432 (17,531 M/19,901 F; age = 63.7 ± 7.5 years) participants from the UK Biobank (UKBB). The FPHI estimates were in excellent agreement with heritability values calculated using Genome-wide Complex Trait Analysis software (r = 0.96 and 0.98 in HCP and UKBB sample) while significantly reducing computational (102–4 times). The regional and voxel-wise traits heritability estimates for the HCP and UKBB were likewise in excellent agreement (r = 0.63–0.76, p < 10−10). In summary, the hardware-accelerated FPHI made it practical to calculate heritability values for voxel-wise neuroimaging traits, even in very large samples such as the UKBB. The patterns of additive genetic variance in neuroimaging traits measured in a large sample of related and unrelated individuals showed excellent agreement regardless of the estimation method. The code and instruction to execute these analyses are available at www.solar-eclipse-genetics.org.
Recommended Citation
Gao, Si & Donohue, Brian & Hatch, Kathryn & Chen, Shuo & Ma, Tianzhou & Ma, Yizhou & Kvarta, Mark & Bruce, Heather & Adhikari, Bhim & Jahanshad, Neda & Thompson, Paul & Blangero, John & Medland, Sarah & Ganjgahi, Habib & Nichols, Thomas & Kochunov, Peter. (2021). Comparing Empirical Kinship Derived Heritability for Imaging Genetics Traits in the UK Biobank and Human Connectome Project. NeuroImage. 245. 118700. 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2021.118700.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Publication Title
Neuroimage
DOI
10.1016/j.neuroimage.2021.118700
Academic Level
faculty
Mentor/PI Department
Office of Human Genetics
Comments
© 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc.