Power R A, Pluess M
MRC Social Genetic & Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King's College London, London, UK.
Department of Biological and Experimental Psychology, School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK.
Transl Psychiatry. 2015 Jul 14;5(7):e604. doi: 10.1038/tp.2015.96.
According to twin studies, the Big Five personality traits have substantial heritable components explaining 40-60% of the variance, but identification of associated genetic variants has remained elusive. Consequently, knowledge regarding the molecular genetic architecture of personality and to what extent it is shared across the different personality traits is limited. Using genomic-relatedness-matrix residual maximum likelihood analysis (GREML), we here estimated the heritability of the Big Five personality factors (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness for experience) in a sample of 5011 European adults from 527,469 single-nucleotide polymorphisms across the genome. We tested for the heritability of each personality trait, as well as for the genetic overlap between the personality factors. We found significant and substantial heritability estimates for neuroticism (15%, s.e. = 0.08, P = 0.04) and openness (21%, s.e. = 0.08, P < 0.01), but not for extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness. The bivariate analyses showed that the variance explained by common variants entirely overlapped between neuroticism and openness (rG = 1.00, P < 0.001), despite low phenotypic correlation (r = - 0.09, P < 0.001), suggesting that the remaining unique heritability may be determined by rare or structural variants. As far as we are aware of, this is the first study estimating the shared and unique heritability of all Big Five personality traits using the GREML approach. Findings should be considered exploratory and suggest that detectable heritability estimates based on common variants is shared between neuroticism and openness to experiences.
根据双胞胎研究，大五人格特质具有显著的遗传成分，可解释40%-60%的变异，但相关基因变异的识别一直难以捉摸。因此，关于人格的分子遗传结构及其在不同人格特质间共享程度的知识有限。我们在此使用基因组相关性矩阵残差最大似然分析（GREML），在一个由来自全基因组527,469个单核苷酸多态性的5011名欧洲成年人组成的样本中，估计了大五人格因素（外向性、宜人性、尽责性、神经质和经验开放性）的遗传力。我们测试了每个人格特质的遗传力，以及人格因素之间的遗传重叠。我们发现神经质（15%，标准误=0.08，P=0.04）和开放性（21%，标准误=0.08，P<0.01）有显著且可观的遗传力估计值，但外向性、宜人性和尽责性没有。双变量分析表明，尽管表型相关性较低（r=-0.09，P<0.001），但常见变异解释的变异在神经质和开放性之间完全重叠（rG=1.00，P<0.001），这表明其余独特的遗传力可能由罕见或结构变异决定。据我们所知，这是第一项使用GREML方法估计所有大五人格特质的共享和独特遗传力的研究。研究结果应被视为探索性的，并表明基于常见变异的可检测遗传力估计值在神经质和经验开放性之间是共享的。
