King's College London, Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, London, UK.
Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK.
Transl Psychiatry. 2017 Dec 12;7(12):1284. doi: 10.1038/s41398-017-0046-x.
For most complex traits, DNA-based heritability ('SNP heritability') is roughly half that of twin-based heritability. A previous report from the Twins Early Development Study suggested that this heritability gap is much greater for childhood behaviour problems than for other domains. If true, this finding is important because SNP heritability, not twin heritability, is the ceiling for genome-wide association studies. With twice the sample size as the previous report, we estimated SNP heritabilities (N up to 4653 unrelated individuals) and compared them with twin heritabilities from the same sample (N up to 4724 twin pairs) for diverse domains of childhood behaviour problems as rated by parents, teachers, and children themselves at ages 12 and 16. For 37 behaviour problem measures, the average twin heritability was 0.52, whereas the average SNP heritability was just 0.06. In contrast, results for cognitive and anthropometric traits were more typical (average twin and SNP heritabilities were 0.58 and 0.28, respectively). Future research should continue to investigate the reasons why SNP heritabilities for childhood behaviour problems are so low compared with twin estimates, and find ways to maximise SNP heritability for genome-wide association studies.
对于大多数复杂特征,基于 DNA 的遗传率(“SNP 遗传率”)大致是基于双胞胎的遗传率的一半。双胞胎早期发展研究的先前报告表明,对于儿童行为问题,这种遗传差异比其他领域要大得多。如果这一发现是正确的,那么这一发现很重要,因为 SNP 遗传率而不是双胞胎遗传率是全基因组关联研究的上限。我们的样本量是之前报告的两倍,对来自同一样本的不同儿童行为问题领域(由父母、教师和孩子自己在 12 岁和 16 岁时评定)的 SNP 遗传率(最多涉及 4653 名无血缘关系的个体)进行了估计,并与双胞胎遗传率进行了比较(最多涉及 4724 对双胞胎)。对于 37 项行为问题衡量标准,双胞胎的平均遗传率为 0.52,而 SNP 的平均遗传率仅为 0.06。相比之下,认知和人体测量特征的结果更为典型(双胞胎和 SNP 的平均遗传率分别为 0.58 和 0.28)。未来的研究应继续调查为什么与双胞胎估计相比,儿童行为问题的 SNP 遗传率如此之低的原因,并寻找方法来最大程度地提高全基因组关联研究中的 SNP 遗传率。