A new article, entitled "The power of genetic diversity in genome-wide association studies of lipids" was published online at Nature on 9th Dec. 2021.

In the study, multi-ancestral meta-GWAS (genome-wide association studies) were performed for five blood-lipid traits (TC, TG, HDL, LDL, and nonHDL) by integrating GWAS summary statistics from 201 cohorts/biobanks in 35 countries, which involves a total of 1.65 million participants of diverse ancestries.

The study showed that increasing ancestral diversity of participants led to higher predictive ability of polygenic score for LDL across populations, including the ToMMo cohort, and also to higher resolution in fine-mapping of causal genetic variants.
ToMMo contributed to the study by applying the multi-ancestral and ancestry-specific polygenic scores for LDL, generated from the meta-GWAS, to about 28,000 participants from the TMM CommCohort Study (Miyagi Prefecture, Japan), and by showing the superiority of the multi-ancestral polygenic score.

The findings indicate that genetic studies in large-scale, multi-ancestral populations may play an important role, by improving the ability to predict disease risk and to identify causal genes, in addressing health disparities across ancestries, which is a major concern worldwide.

Fig. 3: Multi-ancestry LDL-C PRS show similar performance across ancestry groups.

Publication Details

Title: The power of genetic diversity in genome-wide association studies of lipids
Authors: Sarah E Graham, Shoa L Clarke, Kuan-Han H Wu, Stavroula Kanoni, et.al  (Authors from ToMMo: Akira Narita, Gen Tamiya, Masayuki Yamamoto)
Journal: Nature
Published date: 09 December 2021
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04064-3