MRC Social, Genetic & Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, UK.
Psychol Sci. 2013 Apr;24(4):562-8. doi: 10.1177/0956797612457952. Epub 2013 Mar 15.
For nearly a century, twin and adoption studies have yielded substantial estimates of heritability for cognitive abilities, although it has proved difficult for genomewide-association studies to identify the genetic variants that account for this heritability (i.e., the missing-heritability problem). However, a new approach, genomewide complex-trait analysis (GCTA), forgoes the identification of individual variants to estimate the total heritability captured by common DNA markers on genotyping arrays. In the same sample of 3,154 pairs of 12-year-old twins, we directly compared twin-study heritability estimates for cognitive abilities (language, verbal, nonverbal, and general) with GCTA estimates captured by 1.7 million DNA markers. We found that DNA markers tagged by the array accounted for .66 of the estimated heritability, reaffirming that cognitive abilities are heritable. Larger sample sizes alone will be sufficient to identify many of the genetic variants that influence cognitive abilities.
近一个世纪以来，双胞胎和收养研究为认知能力的遗传力提供了大量估计，尽管全基因组关联研究很难确定导致这种遗传力的遗传变异（即遗传缺失问题）。然而，一种新的方法，全基因组复杂性状分析（GCTA），放弃了个体变异的鉴定，以估计在基因分型阵列上的常见 DNA 标记所捕获的总遗传力。在同一对 3154 对 12 岁双胞胎的样本中，我们直接比较了认知能力（语言、言语、非言语和一般）的双胞胎研究遗传力估计值与 170 万个 DNA 标记的 GCTA 估计值。我们发现，数组标记的 DNA 标记占估计遗传力的 0.66，再次证实认知能力是可遗传的。仅增加样本量就足以识别出许多影响认知能力的遗传变异。
