Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
Research Centre of Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
Behav Genet. 2021 Jul;51(4):405-413. doi: 10.1007/s10519-021-10053-z. Epub 2021 Mar 16.
It is long known that inbreeding increases the detrimental effects of recessive sequence variants in "Runs of Homozygosity" (ROHs). However, although the phenotypic association of ROH has been investigated for a variety of traits, the statistical power of the results often remains limited as a sufficiently high number of cases are available for only a restricted number of traits. In the present study, we aim to analyze the association of runs of homozygosity with the trait "in-group ethnic favoritism". This analysis assumes that if ethnic identity is important for an individual, that individual may tend to marry more frequently within their own group and therefore ROH are expected to increase. We hypothesize that an attitude preferring one's own ethnic group may be associated with a stronger tendency of inbreeding and, as a result, with more and longer ROHs. Accordingly, we investigated the association between the attitude to someone's own ethnicity and ROH, using the Wisconsin Longitudinal data (WLS, total N ~ 9000) as discovery data set and the Brisbane Twin data as replication data set (N ~ 8000). We find that both the number as well as the total length of homozygous segments are significantly positively associated with "in-group ethnic favoritism", independent of the method used for ROH calculation.
众所周知，近亲繁殖会增加“纯合区域”（ROH）中隐性序列变异的有害影响。然而，尽管已经研究了 ROH 与多种性状的表型关联，但由于只有少数性状有足够多的病例，结果的统计效力往往仍然有限。在本研究中，我们旨在分析纯合区域与“群体内种族偏好”这一特征之间的关联。该分析假设，如果种族身份对个体很重要，那么个体可能更倾向于在自己的群体内结婚，因此 ROH 预计会增加。我们假设，对自己族群的态度可能与更强的近亲繁殖倾向有关，从而导致更多和更长的 ROH。因此，我们使用威斯康星纵向数据（WLS，总 N9000）作为发现数据集，布里斯班双胞胎数据作为复制数据集（N8000），调查了个体对自身族群态度与 ROH 之间的关联。我们发现，无论使用何种 ROH 计算方法，纯合片段的数量和总长度都与“群体内种族偏好”显著正相关。
